With the CDC’s announcement yesterday that they do not oppose fully vaccinated people gathering maskless indoors, two thoughts came to mind.
The first is that it’s interesting how much power we assigned to the federal government to lead us through this pandemic. States were arguably the crux of the decision-making apparatus—especially at the beginning as governors played such a sizable role—but so much of the focus was on the CDC, and it was largely up to the CDC and the FDA to lead the tactical side of the fight against this scourge. Even the assignment to the state was, for most states, a very broad assignment—I do not envy the task of trying to recommend guidance that works for both Austin and Marfa, nor for both Los Angeles and Carmel-by-the-Sea. It’s a symptom of our nationalization as a culture, our tendency to want to come together nationally to respond to issues rather than locally, in our own communities. Was there community response? Yes. But so much of the focus was on the federal government, and so much of the focus then got partisan, and I wonder if it would have gotten so partisan were we not so nationalized right now in how we deal with everything. I wonder if things would have been more unified if instead of looking for rules from a czar (and liberals and conservatives both did this, to be clear) we looked for information from those who could provide it and then found the best people to make the relevant decisions. This is an oversimplification, but there’s no law of nature that says federal and state government has to be the decisionmaker in a pandemic. We decided that implicitly for ourselves, and those who rejected government decisions largely just accepted the decisions of their own partisanreligious leaders on cable news and the internet.
The second, though, is the main thought, and that’s how hard these decisions have been for those we’ve charged with making them. School boards. Mayors. Governors. The CDC. The decisions have been between how many lives to spare, and which lives, and how much of a life is lost to death versus how much is lost to things like educational and vocational setbacks. It’s been one trolley problem after another. One enormous trolley problem after another.
And I wonder, with that, if—for as infuriating as Greg Abbott and Gavin Newsom and so many others are as politicians, and have been as leaders in the age of the coronavirus—if we should offer a little more compassion to those who’ve had to make hard decisions when we’ve gone to them expecting concrete guidance. There was fear at the beginning of the coronavirus about death panels at hospitals, and while that manifested itself informally, we didn’t pay much attention to the death panels we elected—the death panels who became death panels by default when we went to them and asked what to do. Having lives decided by a death panel is terrifying and tragic and heartbreaking. Having to decide upon lives as a member of a death panel sounds terrifying and tragic and heartbreaking too, though.
Hopefully such decisions will continue to grow easier. But let’s remember that they are and have been very, very hard.
