Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Fertile Soil

We were supposed to be free of this, beyond the restrictions, the extreme measures put in place last year as a viral pandemic swept the country and world. COVID-19 infections had been in decline as Americans — or most of us — willingly took our medicine, got ourselves vaccinated, and continued to fight the virus with social distancing, masks, and a broad sense that sacrifice was necessary.

Instead, as the New York Times headline proclaimed, “COVID Deaths Surge Across a Weary America as a Once-Hopeful Summer Ends,” and the sense of relief, the belief that we could were back to a kind of normal existence has evaporated.

The Delta variant, which the US Centers for Disease Control describes as “more infectious” and more transmissible, has caused an upward spike in new cases, new hospitalizations, and deaths. Variants like Delta were inevitable, infectious disease specialists have warned, basing their concern on the history of other pandemics. The misnamed Spanish Flu, which devastated the world as World War I was coming to a close, spawned numerous variants of varying impact, as have other epidemics and pandemics.

But the variant’s spread has been aided by failures at the state and local level, by the unwillingness of too many governments entities to use the public health tools they had available, and by an anti mask and anti vaccine movement that has found a home in one of the country’s two major political parties.

As the Kaiser Family Foundation reports, Republicans rank last among all demographic groups in the percent of those with say they either have gotten or definitely will get vaccinated. It’s COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor surveyed 1,517 adults in July at found that just 56% of Republicans said “they either have already gotten a COVID-19 vaccine or plan to do so ‘as soon as possible’” — as compared with 89% of Democrats and 67% of independents.

Whites are also less likely to support vaccination than either Blacks or Latinos, especially especially White men without a college education — or Donald Trump’s base. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention over the last 18 months, as Trump stoked the resentment of his base and encouraged their increasingly unhinged attacks on masks and state-imposed restriction — and eventually led to the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill.

This link may seem a stretch, but it is all of a piece — the Charlottesville rally featuring Neo-Nazis and Klan-adjacent groups, the seemingly random right-wing violence that grew more and more prevalent during the Trump years, the anti-mask protests. They grow from a disregard of “two kinds of inhibition” or voluntary restraints, says Rebecca Solnit: one against lies and the other against violence.

The inhibitions against lies and violence “are ways members of civil society normally limit their own actions out of respect for the rights of others and the collective good,” she wrote in The Guardian.

The Jan. 6 “coup attempt,” she said, was erected from a “mountain of lies about the outcome of an election (that) was used to whip up a vigilante mob into an attack not just on Congress but on the ratification of the election results and death threats against the vice-president and against Speaker Pelosi.” The Supreme Court’s Texas abortion ruling, the attacks on voters’ rights and immigration, and the near religious support for police (but only when they are policing the black and brown, as opposed to when officers are protecting the Capitol) are of a piece, a part of the Trump/Republican Party’s assault on democracy itself.

The lies are the key, as they were during the disastrous eight years of George W. Bush, and during the presidencies of Reagan, the elder Bush, and even Bill Clinton. Hell, we can go back farther, to include Eisenhower and Kennedy and Nixon and Johnson, and further back to the interwar years. But it is not presidential lies that have led us to where we stand, to a moment at which a deadly pandemic has resurgence and, as The Washington Post reports, a state like Idaho has for the first time been forced “to start rationing medical care in some overburdened hospitals” and hospitals in other Republican states are running out of bed space.

The Republican narrative was once fringe-worthy stuff pushed by the likes of the John Birch Society and Eagle Forum, by Pat Robertson, Focus on the Family, and Grover Norquist, until those groups were normalized within the the party apparatus, their lies and distortions given voice by Reagan, Bush, Gingrich, and Trump. There was plenty of fertile soil available for the lies to take root and spread, damaging our ability to respond to the COVID crisis, and the environmental and health catastrophes waiting for us in the near future.

Hank Kalet is a writer in central New Jersey. Email, hankkalet @gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites. Subscribe to his Substack at hankkalet.substack.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2021

Populist.com