Lockdown isn’t a strategic choice. Quarantine isn’t a way forward. Self-isolation isn’t a remedy.
That should be clear by now. These are all methods of dealing with a present calamity, not paths to a better future. They are avoidance mechanisms — not solutions to anything but how to keep from getting or passing on a disease.
Yet many people seem to think the answer to “How do we get out of lockdown?” is “more lockdown” — and are so committed to the idea that they freely accuse those who say the present circumstances are intolerable of wanting to murder grandmothers.
Others seem to think that staying inside indefinitely isn’t a cure worse than the disease it is intended to address, when clearly, it is worse — in the very simple sense that it isn’t a cure at all.
Most bizarre, many people seem to think self-isolation is some kind of self-help opportunity for self-improvement — either personal (write that novel!) or geopolitical (we’re saving the planet by not doing anything!).
It’s ludicrous. Here in Gotham, the lockdown regime was imposed to “flatten the curve” — to slow the spread of the disease and prevent the health system from getting overwhelmed.
That was a success — two weeks ago. The USNS Comfort sailed away, barely used. The Javits Center facility closed.
Thank God. The system held.
It appears that in the absence of another approach, we’re just supposed to stay in stasis even though the health system itself is moving on and trying to return to normal. But not us, with our offices still closed. Not our kids, who can’t go to school. Not small businesses, which are being destroyed hourly.
And there’s the rub. The truth is that I feel, and feel deeply, for those who embrace lockdown, quarantine and self-isolation — and who find the prospect of discussing any national emergence from these conditions to be heartless and dangerous.
They aren’t being foolish, though some of them in real life and on social media are being ugly and cruel and nasty and unpleasant and should stop playing rent-a-cop whenever they see someone who isn’t wearing a mask — because you can feel the totalitarian pleasure they’re taking in it.
But they can’t get themselves out of the lockdown loop for the simple fact that they — we — aren’t being offered anything better. And here is where our leaders are failing us. All of them, from the plaster-sainted Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the worse-treated-than-Lincoln President Trump. It’s up to them to lay out a strategy to get us out of this lockdown. Saying “we have to open up” is no more of a strategy than saying “stay inside” was a strategy. It’s reading the stage directions rather than putting on the play.
The president is consumed with the need to tell us what a great job he’s been doing. Maybe there are people who take solace in hearing it; I don’t know.
And it isn’t his fault that the media are consumed with asking why he didn’t do more in February when there are plenty of questions they could ask about what he is doing in May that are more pressing and more important.
But when he says he is confident there will be a vaccine by the end of the year, he is providing the opposite of leadership. He is telling us to join him at the craps table and bet on the come. That doesn’t address what we should be doing now. Now. Now.
Here’s the thing: Nobody told Donald Trump to run for president. Nobody forced Andrew Cuomo to be governor. These were jobs the men sought and won, and they’re really hard jobs, and nothing could be harder than doing these jobs amid an economy-destroying pandemic. I feel for them, too.
But as Hyman Roth once said, this is the business they have chosen. They need to do it better.
jpodhoretz@gmail.com
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May 08, 2020 at 06:55AM
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'Lock down' isn't a strategy — but neither is 'open up' - New York Post
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