It's Not Rocket Science

Thailand, my current home, is a middle income country of around seventy million people. There have been 58 deaths here from the virus and no local cases for months. Life has mostly returned to normal, though almost everyone wears a mask, temperatures are taken entering malls, restaurants, parks and stores, and hand sanitizer is everywhere. ‎And the sports stadiums and nightclubs remain closed.

The resistance in the United States to masks and other steps routinely taken in countries in Asia and Europe to defeat the virus is regarded as insane and shameful to folks here...and in most of the world. And the fact that the resistance is framed in terms of Americans' constitutional rights--rights people in much of the rest of the world wish they had--is a horribly inaccurate framing of our rights.

Who thinks that in times of war drafting Americans to fight is an infringement of our Constitutional rights, rather than an obligation of our citizenship? I doubt many of the Americans who refuse to wear masks today would be sympathetic to anyone making such an argument about serving in World War II, or Vietnam.‎ And in World War II Americans were drafted to do things like storm beaches with machine guns being fired at them as they did so. Being required to wear a piece of cloth around your mouth and nose is an ‎infringement of your Constitutional rights? (Doing so is not an indication of weakness. It is a show of moral and ethical strength.)  Lucky our soldiers in World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan (though no American soldiers were drafted in the Afghanistan or Iraq conflicts) were more public minded. And lucky our elected officials didn't turn the other cheek when those few who refused their duty did so. Because the other thing here in Thailand and elsewhere around the world where the virus has been beaten back is the rules are enforced.

We are at war with the virus. The human casualties and devastation to our economy and social fabric are warlike devastation. As of the writing of this post, the virus has killed more than 172,000 Americans in less than eight months. By contrast, 58,209 Americans were killed in the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1975. 405,399 Americans were killed in World War II in the five years between 1941 and 1945.
And any American with a pulse has seen the economic devastation and tearing of our already torn social fabric the virus has wrought.

So it's a war, but one that countries from Asia to Europe have shown can be won in a few months of sacrifice. But sacrifice means rules that are uniformly applied and enforced. To date America has been like patients who take half of the antibiotic prescribed and then stop, or only remember to take it every other day, then complain that they aren't better. 

Our political leadership needs to look around the world and get with the program. Thailand's death rate from the virus would have translated to about three hundred deaths given the U.S. population of three hundred and thirty million. What the countries that have defeated the virus have done is not rocket science...certainly the country that put men on the moon more than half a century ago can do this.