Only by ignoring news from around the world is one able to uphold a fantasy like that. The provincialism of such a belief is also a product of the US's self-obsession, as if whatever happens anyplace else is either a) all about the US or b) doesn't matter.
It might come as a surprise to some US Americans to hear this, but the world does not revolve around the US. Whatever central position the nation once held has been eroding for some time now, especially rapidly since 2016. The economy, for example, was already in free fall before the pandemic.
Some might like to blame Trump for all this, but neither Margaret Kimberley nor Alley Valkyrie were so sure that it would have been much better under another administration. Valkyrie pointed out that 50 different states would still have been setting 50 different policies. Kimberley was confident that partisanship would still have played a deleterious role. Both agreed that there is something in the US American character that would have resisted doing the right thing no matter who was in the White House.
Both Kimberley and Valkyrie also agreed that it's been disappointing to see so many people on the left spouting COVID-denying bullshit, though Kimberley said:
"Another way to look at it is, when there's a crisis, you find out where people stand. There's people's politics I align with most of the time, but they dispute everything they are told. I'm not saying you can necessarily trust the government" [but] wearing a maskto meis common sense. If there's a communicable respiratory disease that I can get from you and you can get from me, it's common sense if we cover our mouths and our noses."
This disputing of everything that one is told is a characteristic that I have also noticed and been frustrated by. With COVID-19, this is not merely a case of the US government making claims that might be questionable due to corporate influence or partisanship. We're talking about the worldwide medical community sharing data and experiences in a predominantly open way.
The idea that a vast conspiracy is being executed against ordinary citizens in the US by a combination of paramedics in New York, doctors in China, elder-care workers in Italy, epidemiologists in Korea and researchers in Brazilto name just a handful of the medical professionals who have been working directly with the pandemicis so absurd that we need a new word for "delusional."
I now regret being so easy going with the "eccentric" beliefs of all my hippie and New Age friends over the last couple decades. It never felt like a big deal to let them indulge in their pseudo-scientific claims, and, after all, who was I to say if they were wrong? Well, now their misguided notions come with a big price tag, as too many of them claim the pandemic is a "hoax" or that all we have to do is build up our immune systems and eat right.
I'm all for herbal medicine, a healthy diet and no GMOsI did, after all, spend a decade as an organic farmer of vegetables, medicinals and open-pollinated seedsbut I also know that infectious diseases require their own response that's based not merely on modern science, but also on centuries of human experience with pandemics. Quarantines, for example, are an age old method of reducing the spread of disease that have been used effectively since long before germ theory.
Valkyrie mentioned that all French students are required to take a philosophy course at the high school level, with the result that everyone has been taught the basics of critical thinking. That's obviously not the case here in the US, and as kind and well-meaning as many of my hippie and New Age friends might be, their lack of critical thinking skills has never been more apparent "or potentially harmful.
Valkyrie also pointed out that a cultural memory of past pandemics still exists in Europe. "The Plague" has never been forgotten. By contrast, she said, people in the US are cut off from their cultural memory when they immigrate here. By becoming colonial settlers, we give up a connection to the past that would ordinarily help inform our present and guide our future.
Of course, not everyone in the US has been sheltered from the experience of infectious disease and I must add this quotation from a gay friend:
"Re: freedom and requirements for masks, distancing: A lot of you aren't Gay folks who came of age during the AIDS epidemic, and it shows."
For real. I spent a lot time in gay bars in Minneapolis in the early '90s when fear of AIDS was very much present in the social atmosphere. I had a boyfriend then who was older than me and who had lost virtually all his friends in the '80s. I remember the first time I was tested for HIV, in 1995. At that time you had to wait a week for the results and it felt like the longest week ever. When the "negative" paperwork came back, I was so relieved I nearly cried, and I framed it and hung it on my apartment wall.
So when this pandemic came along, I just shifted gears into "act smart" mode. Wear a mask? Okay, no problem. If they're wrong and this disease it's no big deal, then whatever; some slight inconvenience. But if they're right, then it's nothing to f*ck around with.
That our choices can have negative consequences for other people is simply a fact. But in a settler colonial culture, that fact doesn't matter. Nobody matters but you.
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