Contagion is spreading. It’s taking lives. Tanking the economy. Killing jobs. Forcing doors to shut and remain that way – forever, in the cases of what could be an alarming number of businesses. It’s bankrupting airlines and hotel chains. Causing mass hysteria.
I’m talking, of course, not about the coronavirus, but of something much more dangerous and debilitating, something that has already begun to impact our society, and will continue to, for decades down the road.
Panic.
The coronavirus has not caused the motor of the world to stop turning. It has not caused businesses to shut down. It is not the reason that jobs have been lost, or why individuals and families must now figure out how to pay for a mortgage, for groceries (if they can get them), for insurance. It is not the reason kids are out of school, parents out of work, and bosses attempting to find ways to maintain a semblance of payroll. The coronavirus caused none of that.
We did.
Panic did.
Our panicky response to the coronavirus has, ironically but not surprisingly, devastated virtually everyone it was supposed to help. We say our precautions — quarantines, mandated business closures, lockdowns — are to save lives, particularly the elderly, and yet that is the very demographic we have punished the worst, as the economy continues to sink and IRAs and 401Ks plunge deeper and deeper. That demographic may very well never recover from that.
Is a lighter retirement account better than death? Of course. But not all of them would have gotten the coronavirus, which is proving just a notch deadlier to that demographic, worldwide, than the flu. Yet every single one of them will now feel its effects.
We say our efforts are to stop the spread of the virus, and yet, despite the virus infecting just 300,000 people globally, it is but a sneeze compared to the flu. This season alone, the flu, per livescience.com, infected 36 million in the United States, killing 22,000. Nobody is saying that the coronavirus is not deadly or dangerous, just as nobody would say that the flu is not deadly or dangerous. The difference is that, while the coronavirus, like the flu, would not have impacted the overwhelming majority of us in any significant manner, our panic has now insured it will infect 100 percent of our lives. We have widened the scope of its impact more than we can know, and likely will know, for years to come.
It is a virus’s job, its life mission, to spread as much as possible, to jump from host to host. Panic has given the coronavirus superpowers. It is now airborne and digital, able to worm its way into our quarantined lives even if we shut all the doors board up the windows.
And yet we remain blind to it all, hiding behind the curtain of “social responsibility.”
“I promise,” someone wrote in a virally popular tweet, “your hip hop yoga class can wait.”
Yes, it can. For you. For me. For Kathy and Karen and whomever else might love their yoga. But you know who it cannot wait for? The yoga studio and everyone who invested in it. It cannot wait for the instructors who rely on that class for their income. It cannot wait for the owners, the founders, the guy at the front desk.
Life cannot wait for a virus to run its course. The world doesn’t stop turning.
The mindset behind that tweet, adopted by the social media mob and now our respective governments who have ordered at-home lockdowns, is the reason that our favorite restaurants and shops and, yes, yoga studios, may never open again. It is the reason those instructors don’t have a job right now, and everything else that comes with having a job: financial security, manageable stress levels, the ability to pay for basic necessities like groceries, rent, water.
There will be a measurable amount of cases and deaths caused by the coronavirus. There will be no way to measure the depression, anxiety, heart attacks, strokes, and suicides caused as a result of the world shutting itself down.
But the government will step in, they say. And it has. To the tune of a trillion-dollar stimulus package that is currently being pushed through congress. While everyone is lauding our government, waiting for their unearned checks to come in, few, it seems, have wondered where that money is coming from. It certainly isn’t from anonymous donations. It’s coming at the cost of everyone, including the children I do not yet have as well as yours.
We have done this. All of it.
The coronavirus has a finite cluster of symptoms and consequences. It can only do so much. It can only have dire consequences to a limited amount of people. By halting the motor of the world, we have taken those dire consequences and burdened everyone, including millions of people who would never have contracted the virus, with things far worse.
The most frightening prospect of this is the idea that, when this has passed — and it will — we may look back at our reactions and say that we were right. We were right to forfeit our rights to the government. Right to crush the global economy. Right to demand people stay in their homes, to do nothing, to watch as businesses and lives were crushed in the name of “social responsibility.”
Right to take away our freedom and autonomy to choose. I understand that the coronavirus is dangerous, and that every time I go outside and interact with people, I could contract it. Just as I understand that every time I drive on the 405, I could die in a car accident — it is, in fact, far more likely I die from a car accident than the coronavirus. Just as I understand that when I swim in the ocean, I could drown, get stung by a stingray, bit by a shark.
I still have the choice to do all of those things, dangerous or not.
Not only have we allowed the government to take that choice from us, we have asked them to. Begged them to. We are inviting them to run our lives. The precedent that we’re setting should frighten you more than this virus, which will pass. But this will not be the last time something like this occurs. There will be more pandemics, natural disasters, others of that ilk, and I have little doubt several will be worse. What this one has shown us is how poorly prepared we are for exactly that.
In our spectrum of responses, there is a middle ground between apathy and panic. That is the area we need to find: The area where we don’t become our own worst virus.
