Why America was uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19
Stephen H. Provost
Too bad corporate America didn’t design the coronavirus. They would have built in planned obsolescence, and it would have been gone before you know it.
Of course, no one would have wanted a new and improved model of this thing, so there would have been no money in it.
The fact is, though, that our revolving-door consumer culture, spurred on by the internet, made us uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19 by teaching us to be impatient and conditioning us to demand results NOW.
A 2017 survey by Fetch and YouGov showed that only 41% of those responding would wait more than 15 minutes for a ride from a mobile app, such as Uber or Lyft, and barely a quarter (26%) would wait more than 30 minutes for takeout food.
When we don’t get those results, we move on to something else.
Perfect storm
That’s what we did after COVID-19 hit. We closed things down for a month, then we opened them up again on our schedule rather than making sure it was safe to do so.
Imagine if a hurricane hit your area, and instead of waiting for the all-clear, you said to yourself, “I’m going to leave the house in 24 hours, come hell or high water.”
If, after those 24 hours passed, you stepped out the door and were hit by 100 mph winds and torrential rain, you’d probably go back inside. But because the coronavirus is invisible, you can pretend it isn’t there.
Never mind those numbers on the TV screen showing millions of total cases and more than 150,000 dead. If you don’t know any of those people, they’re just numbers, easily dismissed as a hoax or fake news.
When you have a president who TELLS YOU it’s fake news, and supports you not wearing a mask, there’s even more reason for you to ignore reality.
Not just Trump
The foundation for this catastrophic failure was laid long before Trump got elected, though.
Modern society has conditioned us to be impatient. Why wait for the morning newspaper when you have a 24/7 cacophony of “breaking news” on TV and online? Why go to the store when you can order from Amazon? Why get together with friends when you’ve got social media and face calls?
Social media have become ever more tuned into instant gratification. Twitter limits posts to a few characters, Instagram focuses on pictures, and Snapchat has “snap” right in the name. TikTok specializes in short-form videos, with the emphasis on “short.”
It’s not as though we’re ignorant of what’s happening. A total of 41% in that Fetch/YouGov survey said they had grown more impatient than they had been five years ago as a result of an overreliance on technology.
That was in 2017. I suspect it’s only gotten worse.
Trump is both a symptom and an enabler of this. He’s too impatient to read his daily briefings and uses Twitter to communicate. His supporters don’t see anything wrong with this, because they’re doing it, too.
It’s no coincidence that his supporters are, on the whole, less educated: less inclined to sit down and read a book or in-depth article, and more apt to just “look at the pictures.”
Mary L. Trump wrote in her recent book that she provided material to The New York Times for a 14,000-word article on the Trump family’s finances that was the longest in its history. That’s probably one reason it didn’t have an impact: People were more likely scrolling Twitter.
It was as invisible and irrelevant to Trump supporters as COVID-19.
It’s our own fault
Impatient and naïve as we are, be believed we could treat the coronavirus like an Uber. If it didn’t depart in 15 minutes, we’d just ignore it.
There’s a reason that “ignore” and “ignorance” have the same root, and it’s a misnomer to think that the latter is always bliss. Just ask those whose lives have been changed forever because a loved one has died from the virus, or they can’t shake it themselves.
Or don’t ask them because they’re just one of “those people” — the kind who don’t matter because you’re convinced they’re nothing like you. It can’t happen here, you think, because you’re special. You’re rich or white or male or you’ve got connections.
Trump and his ilk have divided people in to us and them on so many levels that we’ve come to accept it, even when it comes to the virus. THEY might get it, but WE won’t. They might want to look weak and wear masks, but we’ll be damned if we’ll be caught dead in one.
Until you’re not wearing one, and you really are caught dead — by the virus.
If a tree falls in the forest and you don’t hear it, it can still kill you if you’re standing under it when it falls on you.
Except this tree is falling on all of us, and we’re too busy waiting for the next Instagram “influencer” to post or griping about slow service at the McDonald’s drive-through that we won’t know what hit us until we’re dead.