May 18th 2020

By James Rogers Bush

We are now in the process of performing a great gamble. We are going to open up the country. We are going to resume the economy. And the chips in this gamble are the elderly and infirm.

Donald Trump, a man desperate to win again, the Republican Party, a party desperate to maintain its power, and Trump supporters, a people desperate to turn back the clock to ‘Make America Great Again’ are all straining at the bit to return things to ‘normal’ at the expense of those most vulnerable to COVID-19.

In the next few weeks, we are going to find out if opening the country and the economy, without adequate testing and safeguards, is the winning thing to do. And we are going to find out how many people Americans are willing to sacrifice to win back a sense of normalcy. We are going to find out just how much value the American People put on the lives of others, especially the elderly and the infirm.

The coronavirus may come back like gangbusters, and the losses may be so great everywhere that everyone in every state will finally be in the same desperate place, regardless of age, physical condition, location, or political point of view. Or it may just drag on, relentlessly infecting and killing, but at a slow pace, and in a way that Americans, especially those least at risk, can ignore what is happening to others.

Whether or not there is a dramatic resurgence of the virus, COVID-19 is not going away anytime soon and the economy is never going to return to where it was before the outbreak. The losses and trauma have been too great and we will be a nation with mass PTSD. Healing, both the national psyche and economy, will take time. And in the meantime, the coronavirus will continue to spread, either slowly or massively, and how many of us we are willing to sacrifice, for the good of the economy and those least at risk, will continue to be a very real ethical and moral question.

I have read how, in times of famine, the Inuit People would leave their elderly and infirm on the ice for the Polar Bears when they became too much of a burden to be fed or cared for by the nomadic group. I’m beginning to wonder if we, as a nation, are now about to do a modern version of leaving our elderly and infirm on the ice, while the rest of us move on.

I’m also wondering if we are willing to gamble our greatness as a people; a people known for leaving no one behind; a people known for caring for the ‘least of these,’ on a risk that could expose us for not being the ‘Land of the Free and Home of the Brave,’ as we like to believe, but for being nothing more than selfish cowards, who believe in the dictums ‘every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost,’ and, ‘let the chips fall where they may.’

I think we are about to find out.