COVID-19 lockdowns, riots, looting, murder and mayhem, how surreal and haunting these days are but with all this I am still thankful, grateful and fortunate. I was hoping these dark days would’ve brought out the best in people’s humanity. But I’m sadly mistaken and it seems to have done the complete opposite and brought out people’s inhumanity to one another. Am I the only person who feels this way? I can’t be the only one? The more and more I speak with people these days the future seems bleak. Many even say their intuition is telling them that something is extremely dire in our midst. As if COVID-19 and all its cause and effect isn’t enough. But I must agree I’ve felt it too. I don’t think anyone can put a finger on what it is that’s ‘coming’. But I believe we are in for a very big awakening, something traumatic.
But not to digress, as I said I do feel fortunate because when I listen to the stories of families and friends from Uganda, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon my issues pale in comparison and I’m sure no doubt that most of us do. The basic lack of food and water the two things that sustain all life. To be faced with being unable to feed your starving children on the brink of death so you hang yourself from the nearest tree to your home like some families I know have in Uganda. Or some parents who cannot feed their starving children so they burn them to death as I’ve been told by families in Palestine. How long could you survive during a 14-day lockdown and all you have in the pantry is a small box of flour and rice and a can of kerosene? Even one person wouldn’t make it, let alone a family of four. And this is what’s happening in so many places I’m privy to.
Why doesn’t the government help you might ask? Well now there’s a great question. In third world countries we throw up our hands and say oh it’s Africa or the Middle East or S.E Asia but it’s happening right here in the richest country in the world and yet the government doesn’t help. It makes me ponder the whole God concept. Why would God allow these awful things to happen? But it’s not about God it’s about us, human beings. We are the ones that allow it to happen and we are all complicit in some way. It’s so easy to blame the neighbor, politicians, or our government or leaders, but what are we all doing to change it and make it better? It seems many are just adding more fuel to an already incendiary situation.
In America we are close to 200,000 deaths. With projected estimates that by January we will have more than double that number to 400,000. And more than likely 90% of these deaths are needless. Think about that for a moment, the scale of such tragedy. There’s a deafening silence about all that. Do you think we care as much as we should? I believe we are in deep, deep denial about the catastrophe we are currently living through. If for any other reason approximately 1,000 people are dying every day. Let’s put it all in perspective. Nothing in post-war history has killed 200,000 people in America. We are living through a catastrophe without modern precedent or parallel.
But doesn’t it seem odd to you that we’re not really grieving as societies, not even having days of collective mourning? That we don’t seem to be affected in anyway beyond selfishly? That we’re clamoring impatiently for life to return to normal? Sure, everyone’s weary and anxious for themselves and their loved ones these days. But what does it say that we don’t seem to be processing the true impact of a catastrophe like this? Doesn’t the sentiment seem to be at odds with mass death, fail to reflect it entirely? Why don’t we read a single headline that speaks of such horrific numbers? And why don’t we seem capable of the gravity and grace such horror and tragedy calls for?
I’ve asked many questions and I’m genuinely interested in an answer to why do we seem indifferent to death on a mass scale? You can call me morbid or even foolish, call me whatever you like. I think it says something about us. Deafening silence always does. A generous interpretation of all the above might go like this. We’re all still numb. We’re in a kind of collective shock. It’s all happened too fast and too hard for us to really process yet, which means to really accept as real. Events have outpaced our emotions. The grief is there and it will come out, one day, in the near future, when we’ve had time to breathe again.
Alas, this is bullshit. I’m not one prone to sugarcoat harsh realities. I’ve always been a believer to go by people’s actions and not words. And it appears to me that people’s actions belie a certain kind of attitude. It seems to me that we are really indifferent to death on a mass scale. That should hardly be surprising, though. Here are some other things we’ve been indifferent to at a social level. Concentration camps, kids in cages, family separations, demagoguery, hate, and so on. Sure, there are a small number of us who care but let’s be honest it’s a very small number. And then there are the endless wars. That too is death on a mass scale. How many countries are we bombing? Does anyone even know? Like I said, indifference.
We should hardly be surprised that Americans are indifferent to death on a mass scale, given all the above. When have they really cared about each other? There’s a valuable lesson in there somewhere as long as you have the stomach to be really honest with yourself. One thing COVID-19 teaches us is that Americans are genuinely indifferent to mass death. They just don’t care about it on any higher level at all. Sure, they’re hysterical about the economic impact but the psychological toll, the moral price, the ethical cost the human dimension? Nobody much in America really cares about that whatsoever. Like I said, there hasn’t even been a day of mourning and you never really see the death toll discussed, much less grieved over.
What has happened to make society end up like that? You see we are not beings who are naturally indifferent to death. Even a child cries at the idea of dying. We are born with a natural horror and repulsion to death. For a society to therefore be in indifferent to mass death, isn’t just weird, or strange or gruesome, but deeply and profoundly unnatural. Being indifferent to mass death is one of the ways in which the rest of the world has come to regards America as uncivilized. I’m asked the same question over and over again from my Europeans friends, “How can Americans live with themselves denying everyone else healthcare?”
Americans are steeped in a history and culture of brutality like no other on planet earth. America was first the original constitutional slave state. Then it was the society that pioneered a global slave trade, raiding an entire continent for human bodies. Then, even when it fought a civil war against that very idea it didn’t really free the slaves, but segregated them. After segregation ended though it never really ended as statistics show Americans needed someone new to exploit. By the 1970’s when segregation ended and the system needed a new class to exploit guess whom it turned out to be? This time, everyone. Even the white working class and middle class began to be exploited ruthlessly, too. Americans incomes began to stagnate in 1971 more or less the precise moment segregation ended. Coincidence? Hardly. It’s a relationship, which proves that America always needed to exploit someone, and if it couldn’t be blacks, hey why not just make it everyone. Everyone, at least, that was in the middle and working class.
Americans began to do the only thing they could to re-establish dominance and control. They refused to fund any real public goods at a social level. “I won’t pay for those dirty people’s healthcare, schools, retirement!” The real American was trying to re-establish a society where they were supreme, separate, on top, even if it cost them having a working society. Because, after all, the price was that they never had healthcare and so forth themselves. But so what? They gained what they were really after: a feeling of supremacy and power and dominance. And that, bizarrely, is still where Americans are, even the good ones.
Who in their right mind would be foolish enough to turn down better healthcare during a deadly pandemic? Such a person must really, really believe in violence. They might not think they do, like many Americans, they might think violence is something that only happens at the point of a gun. But that only makes them foolish. Because denying you decent healthcare during a literal pandemic or not even during one is violence too. I’m saying that I’m indifferent to your cancer, disease, suffering. That I don’t care if your kids fall ill and I couldn’t care less if your wife or husband or brother or sister gets sick. It makes no difference at all to me.
But why would it be any indifferent to your suffering? The only reason is that I must think mine outweighs it. In that way, Americans are narcissists. And narcissists, as we all know, can’t really care about each other. A society of narcissists won’t have functioning hospitals, schools, banks, living standards will fall, and it will collapse, predictable, ultimately, into fascist- authoritarianism. It’ll become a bitter, brutal battle for self-preservation, in which the most violent, greedy, and brutal rise to the top. Sound like America collapsing so far? Then consider this. Americans were born in a kind of violent narcissism, a profound violence so deep they enslaved a whole continent, unable to see anyone else as their equals. Narcissism is the curse of a Promised Land if it belongs to you, you must be a special person, indeed. And if you are that special well then why not do a little violence to show the sub-humans their place? And so Darwinian logic came to rule America, and still does.
That Americans are indifferent to the deaths of 200,000 of their fellow citizens teaches us something painful, deep, and true. What happens when we try to build a society on narcissism? We fail. We end up in a place so cruel, so selfish, and so vain that even death on a mass scale ceases to matter. Because all along, the only thing that has ever mattered is the individual, exerting his will to power, by exploiting and dominating someone weaker.
Does human nature ever really change?