I really want to believe in an America capable of setting a goal — even a fantastic one like a man on the moon — and organizing a methodical step-by-step project that can achieve it. That America actually existed in 1969.
It also existed in 1944 with the Normandy invasion, the largest deployment of troops and weapons in the history of the world, which brought down Hitler and was commanded by the American general Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I want to believe fervently in that America but my country’s chaos in responding to the COVID pandemic makes it difficult to do so.
Two presidents now have set the goal of meeting the challenge of a pandemic and both have fallen short. President Trump’s: “Operation Warp Speed” impressively produced in months the vaccines which normally took years.
President Biden’s budget equally impressively produced the money necessary to distribute the vaccines, masks and tests which (combined with social distancing regulations) could vastly limit the spread of virus. But nobody connected the dots.
As we begin the third year of the pandemic, 900,000 Americans have died of the virus, exceeding American fatalities in the Civil War (620,000) or World War II (405,399) or the Vietnam War (58,209).
Perhaps sadly symbolic of that failure is the announcement on Feb. 18 that the surgeon general of the country Vivek Murthy, had contracted COVID himself, as has his wife and two children. He’s the doctor in charge of America’s health!
This announcement came the very week that governors of several liberal states have announced the lifting of mask mandates.
Of course we all wish Dr. Murthy and his family well, but when the chief medical officer of the country contracts the very illness which that officer is in charge of wrestling to the ground, it hardly inspires confidence.
It makes you wonder: What does it really mean to be in charge of anything in America?
Are we now a country where titles are worn and salaries collected but where leaders can’t even keep themselves safe from the very virus they are in charge of avoiding?
What if the president of Planned Parenthood announced she was months into an unscheduled pregnancy?
Where is our Normandy moment in the pandemic? Why haven’t hundreds of thousands of Americans armed with masks and tests and needles landed in every neighborhood in the country ready to defeat the enemy?
Where is the Neil Armstrong moment of inspirational eloquence in this so-far-unrealized moment of technological triumph? “One small inoculation for humans; One giant immunization for humankind.”
There’s isn’t a silent majority these days. There’s a deluded majority which tweets out in social media 24/7.
Unlike Janis Joplin’s “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” our social media majority insists that freedom’s just another word for something left to choose
Rather than submit to mandatory anything, they want the freedom to choose to outwit an invisible opponent by themselves: no government mandates about vaccines, masks or isolation.
They just tweet “freedom, freedom, freedom to choose’” even unto death.
So we won’t be landing on the 2022 equivalent of the beaches of Normandy or the chalk of the Moon any time soon in breathtaking feat of American organizational goal-setting.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in COVID: it is in ourselves. Our free, but disorganized, selves.