At The Heart Of COVID 19: Fear

April 16th, 2020 by Tom Lynch

 

“One fear creates a dereliction, which brings a greater fear, and there comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up…” – Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel.

“We have to remember the enemy is the virus. Not one another.” – Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

The protests are ramping up. Over the last two days groups demanding governors reopen state economies have gathered to protest stay at home orders.

Protesters in Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, Utah, North Carolina and Virginia have made their presence felt and voices heard. Timed to coincide with governors’ daily press briefings on COCVID 19, to varying degrees of success they tried to drown out the gubernatorial updates.

By far, the largest protest was yesterday in Lansing, Michigan where, for five miles, thousands of vehicles blocked traffic going into or out of the city. They also blocked all traffic heading to Sparrow Hospital, which meant hospital workers were denied access to the most important jobs in the nation: Treating COVID 19 victims. And, to make a bad situation worse, many, perhaps most, of the protesters were unmasked, standing around as if they’d never heard the term, “social distance.”

Here’s a pretty alarming photo from Ohio:

And this from Michigan:

Yes, those really are automatic weapons in the hands of angry protesters. People, this is a bad combination.

What in the name of Galen is going on here?

How about fear and insecurity?

When I was a commander in Vietnam, training, and lots of it, kept my unit alive. We trained for everything imaginable, and when bad things happened, we were scared, but prepared. Running toward danger is not an intuitive response. Training takes over in those situations. Here, in the midst of COVID 19, no one has any training, and that includes most of the health care workers on the front lines fighting this entirely new disease. Everyone is making it up as they go along, and our health care workers…excuse me, our health care heroes… are learning new things every day aimed at keeping people alive.

Americans have no training or experience to guide them through the stay at home period, however long it turns out to be. And so, they fearfully worry. About themselves, their kids, their parents and grandparents, and their jobs. Many of those jobs could be gone forever, and this scares them to their core. That, along with the open-ended nature of the stay at home orders, leads to fearing the worst.

People are looking for something to believe in, some hope, someone to blame, so, when right wing rabble rousers stoke their fears…

Defusing this growing powder keg starts at the top. The nation’s governors, with some notable exceptions, have stepped up and are doing all they can to keep their citizens alive. They have to, because Donald Trump and his administration have performed so poorly during the crisis. It is unfortunate, indeed, that the president cannot help himself from fanning the flames of his base. Yesterday’s protests were replete with Trump and MAGA hats, as well as, ironically, protesters calling the stay at home orders “tyranny.”

The protests without social distancing or masks are going to result in more infections and deaths. That is a terrible thing. And so unnecessary.

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