Why is the pandemic being framed as a war instead of a public health crisis? It’s not a war. It’s a public health crisis that ballooned to disaster due to failures in governance at every level, especially federal.
I had a bit of a debate (albeit a civil one) about Bass' statement with one of my former neighbors. I made the case the analogy wasn't entirely inappropriate given the calls upon President Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act (which he has done on a limited and selective basis). My neighbor countered that this country is infatuated with war and are drawing false equivalencies. She is not entirely wrong whether it was LBJ's War on Poverty or Reagan's War on Drugs both of which ought to have been approached in a public health framework. Nor was she wrong with regard to the comparisons to 9/11. As I noted when people talked in the streets about 9/11 in the days that followed the worse was over. But when people talked about the Coronavirus in the street the worse was still to come and still is.
However, in the three plus weeks since we had this discussion, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of more Americans than the Vietnam War and we are now approaching 60,000 deaths. Mind you the 58,318 American military deaths in Vietnam came about over nearly 20 years. COVID-19 claimed that many Americans in less than three months. When that many Americans die in less than 90 days we've gone well beyond a public health crisis. A pandemic and a war aren't the same, but both can change the psyche of a people in an irreversible manner. As Jonathan V. Last put it in his The Bulwark article "COVID-19 Is This Generation's Vietnam":
The long Vietnam debacle created tremendous pressure on American society. As people watched the casualty count climb and saw friends and loved ones perish, this pressure built until the old order cracked and was swept away in revolution and counter-revolution.
In physics, we measure pressure by calculating force applied over area. Given the same amount of force, but a smaller area, the pressure increases.
I wonder if something like this holds for societal stressors. Take the force of a shock and spread it out over a large time horizon—say, three or four years—and the resulting societal pressures will be smaller than if it happens across a relatively short time frame.
What happens when you compress the time frame? Even aside from the economic impact of the last two months and the months ahead, what is the societal impact of experiencing the death toll of Vietnam—and counting—over a 12 week period?
The answer is: A great deal of societal pressure.
The point is not that the pandemic is worse than Vietnam, or vice versa; historically and morally, they are very different world events. The point, rather, is that, three months into the COVID-19 crisis, most Americans have yet to internalize the magnitude of the change that could come from it.
The effects of the Vietnam war on American society and the American psyche—and on more than a generation of U.S. foreign and domestic politics—were enormous.
The present pandemic could have similarly huge effects. These might be the early days of a wave of change that could reshape everything in America: Our politics. Our economics. Our views of each other and of the world around us.
However, in the three plus weeks since we had this discussion, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of more Americans than the Vietnam War and we are now approaching 60,000 deaths. Mind you the 58,318 American military deaths in Vietnam came about over nearly 20 years. COVID-19 claimed that many Americans in less than three months. When that many Americans die in less than 90 days we've gone well beyond a public health crisis. A pandemic and a war aren't the same, but both can change the psyche of a people in an irreversible manner. As Jonathan V. Last put it in his The Bulwark article "COVID-19 Is This Generation's Vietnam":
The long Vietnam debacle created tremendous pressure on American society. As people watched the casualty count climb and saw friends and loved ones perish, this pressure built until the old order cracked and was swept away in revolution and counter-revolution.
In physics, we measure pressure by calculating force applied over area. Given the same amount of force, but a smaller area, the pressure increases.
I wonder if something like this holds for societal stressors. Take the force of a shock and spread it out over a large time horizon—say, three or four years—and the resulting societal pressures will be smaller than if it happens across a relatively short time frame.
What happens when you compress the time frame? Even aside from the economic impact of the last two months and the months ahead, what is the societal impact of experiencing the death toll of Vietnam—and counting—over a 12 week period?
The answer is: A great deal of societal pressure.
The point is not that the pandemic is worse than Vietnam, or vice versa; historically and morally, they are very different world events. The point, rather, is that, three months into the COVID-19 crisis, most Americans have yet to internalize the magnitude of the change that could come from it.
The effects of the Vietnam war on American society and the American psyche—and on more than a generation of U.S. foreign and domestic politics—were enormous.
The present pandemic could have similarly huge effects. These might be the early days of a wave of change that could reshape everything in America: Our politics. Our economics. Our views of each other and of the world around us.
The first group of Americans who will internalize the magnitude of COVID-19 are doctors, nurses and health care workers as exemplified by the recent suicide of Dr. Lorna Breen of New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital. As I noted in my lament for Dr. Breen, medical professionals who are treating COVID-19 patients now have some of the same experiences of medical professionals who treated American soldiers in combat. A war and a pandemic aren't the same thing, but both bring about death with good people unable to stop it. These good people get PTSD and in the case of COVID-19 it has only just begun. War is hell. So is a pandemic.
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