Commentary by A. Grieve-Smith

I have a confession to make, and it’s something I feel terrible about. I was prepared to let hundreds of thousands of people die of COVID-19.

In March I was prepared to go right back to work after a mysterious fever that ran through my family for a few days, and keep going in to the office for the rest of the year. I was prepared to continue eating in restaurants, drinking in bars, sleeping in hotels, shaking hands and hugging people right through the pandemic, without masks or social distance, even as people around me were dying.

I was prepared to lose a friend to the disease, since they say the mortality rate is about one percent. I was prepared to lose my mother, my sister, my wife, my child, even to die myself.

I was prepared to carry on through the deaths as though nothing was happening, but then all of a sudden we weren’t carrying on. I got an email that we’d be working from home for a week, and then the rest of the month, then the rest of the semester, and now the rest of the year. I heard the mayor and the governor announce that restaurants, hotels, shops would be closed. I got the orders to wash hands, keep social distance, wear masks. I guess we’re doing this then, I thought.

I was prepared for everyone to march on without caring for the dying because I’ve tried to buck trends before. I’ve been the only boy in the class who cried, the only kid who didn’t say the “under god” part in the Pledge of Allegiance, the only person in my social circle who didn’t own a car.

I knew that these kinds of anti-pandemic measures require widespread participation to be effective, and I knew how hard it is to get that participation. I’ve tried to organize people to make relatively modest changes, and I’ve seen the resistance that people can summon to even the most minor inconvenience. I had little hope that things would change.

But things did change, and I changed to go along with it. I worked from home, organized Zoom get-togethers, did karaoke over Twitch, avoided going shopping, ordered takeout from restaurants and cancelled travel plans. And I started wearing a mask, keeping distance from others and washing my hands more frequently. Since we got past the curve and started “reopening” I’ve gotten together with friends, but stayed outside, kept my mask on and avoided physical contact.

Still, sometimes I think back to things I said back in February and March, and remember how I was prepared to change nothing. I’m not happy about that. I’d like to think that I’m the kind of person who always tries to do the right thing. But what is the right thing for one person to do, when the right thing requires widespread collective action, and that one person doesn’t have the power to compel collective action?

I didn’t have much power, but I discovered that other people did. My department head had the authority to order us to work from home. Our mayor and governor and state legislature had the authority to order offices and restaurants and shops closed, and to impose curfews, and to require mask-wearing. We had the power to resist to some degree, but there has been a lot of compliance. Congress and the President passed appropriations to essentially pay people to stay home.

Over the past several months I’ve learned that we already had traditions of social distance, lockdowns and mask wearing that have been used in past pandemics over the centuries. Why do so many histories focus on innovations in science (germ theory, mosquitoes) and technology (sewers, drainage, vaccines), and on How Stupid People Were Back Then (theories like miasma and night air, and the infamous 1918 Philadelpia victory parade), and not on masks, lockdowns and outdoor dining?

A lot of the shutdown of offices, shops and restaurants was facilitated by the widespread adoption of remote work, online learning and delivery of all kinds of objects, including food and medicine. These practices in turn have been prepared and encouraged by employers, college administrators and the owners of delivery companies, and to some degree by employees, students and shoppers, out of a belief that they are cheaper and more convenient. It’s not obvious to me that that belief is well-founded, but if it weren’t widespread, would there have been as much compliance with the lockdowns?

I was impressed at the amount of influence certain people wielded at particular points. The early injunctions to more frequent and thorough hand-washing, along with catchy two-minute pop-culture songs to hum and mantras to recite (remember “Fear is the mind-killer”?) while washing drew people in and functioned as a kind of structure test. Viral posts about flattening the curve helped to convince people that behavioral changes were urgent but temporary. Influential people who set an example on the street and on social media allowed some of us to feel comfortable adopting practices like face masks that had been seen as foreign.

Of course, people can also withhold their power to compel and encourage collective action. The most tragic example is that of Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo, who could have saved tens of thousands of lives by giving shutdown orders a week earlier, but held back for whatever reasons. Donald Trump and his followers in the Republican Party, including Mitch McConnell and Lachlan Murdoch, have ended the unemployment and stimulus payments, and shockingly turned practices that could save thousands of lives into badges of political allegiance.

Some of these negative practices appear to have been motivated by a thirst for power on the part of people like Cuomo and Trump. Some stem from a fear that generous unemployment and stimulus benefits could lead people to ask why we don’t provide those benefits all the time. Others are driven by the news that those most at risk from the coronavirus are the same people that our society already takes advantage of — Black and Latinx people, American Indians, immigrants and poor people — and a reluctance to do anything that might disproportionally benefit them.

It worries me a lot to realize how much of our ability to act in moral ways is constrained by the power of others. Especially by people who have amassed power for the sake of power, or out of greed, like our current leaders. It saddens me to see how I’ve learned to have such low expectations of our leaders. And how some of them haven’t even risen to those low expectations.

This is the first in a series of posts about COVID-19. Here is the second, and here is the most recent.

I originally published this on Medium. I haven’t been very happy with Medium recently, so I’ve started moving some of my posts from there to this blog.