Are We Really All in This Together?
by John Lawrence, October 21, 2020
The pandemic in terms of dying has affected mainly old people and minorities, but also there have been many at the highest level White House related cases including 87 year old Senator Chuck Grassley. I assume that these high level cases have been and will be treated with monoclonal antibodies like Remdesivir which "cured" President Trump. These treatments it should be noted are not available to everyone. Why not if they are so efficacious. Those who have the best treatments available can subscribe to the thesis that the coronavirus is no big deal. Mainly others are doing the dying.
Pope Francis' words of wisdom, Fratelli Tutti, his encyclical letter on Fraternity and Social Friendship represents a plea that we all should be in this together even though it's clear that in many parts of the world we're not. His words of wisdom follow:
"All too quickly, however, we forget the lessons of history, “the teacher of life”. Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation. God willing, after all this, we will think no longer in terms of “them” and “those”, but only “us”. If only this may prove not to be just another tragedy of history from which we learned nothing. If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators, partly as a result of the dismantling, year after year, of healthcare systems. If only this immense sorrow may not prove useless, but enable us to take a step forward towards a new style of life. If only we might rediscover once for all that we need one another, and that in this way our human family can experience a rebirth, with all its faces, all its hands and all its voices, beyond the walls that we have erected.
"Unless we recover the shared passion to create a community of belonging and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy and our resources, the global illusion that misled us will collapse and leave many in the grip of anguish and emptiness. Nor should we naively refuse to recognize that “obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction”. The notion of “every man for himself” will rapidly degenerate into a free-for-all that would prove worse than any pandemic."
Yet in the US we are divide into two nations fundamentally at war with each other. Even religious institutions fan the flames of political divides. Masc wearing has become something that freedom loving Americans feel free to not do on Constitutional grounds. Caring about the welfare of others is unAmerican when it takes away from some Americans' freedoms. That's the American way: freedom trumps "Fraternity and Social Friendship" as the Pope would say. Is freedom the only value worth supporting? Must it dominate all other values? Must saving the earth from global warming be politicized into a Left-Right issue? Those who want to convert to renewable energy are characterized as "too far Left?" It isn;t a matter of Left Right. It's a matter of what is the right thing to do.
When it comes time to give the American people a tax break, there's no hue and cry about deficit spending. When the big banks were bailed out costing trillions of dollars, there was no hue and cry about deficit spending. Even though many of the bankers had committed fraud, none of them went to jail and the fines were just a slap on the wrist. But when a government program that forgives student loan debt or funds a massive green infrastructure program is mentioned, all of a sudden Republicans are concerned about deficit spending. It's "too far Left." Providing affordable housing, feeding the hungry, creating jobs for the unemployed - all those ideas are "too far Left." It's more important to preserve American values than it is to solve social problems. In other words despite the Pope's pleas, we are not all in this together. Freedom is more important than social cohesion.
