We’ve Reached the Pandemic’s Point of No Return
The holidays are a turning point for Americans who are making the calculation that Covid-19 simply doesn’t matter
“We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality,” psychologist Ernest Becker wrote in 1973, “that we do not really control our own lives.” Becker’s book, The Denial of Death, made a simple point: Rather than face the fact that we have so little control over our own mortality, we repress the very fact of death to the detriment of the world and ourselves.
It is now November 2020, and for the third time this year, the coronavirus pandemic is out of control. Except instead of a state-by-state outbreak, the virus is now everywhere. Exponential growth points nearly vertically on the graph of new cases, screaming toward a mind-boggling future of 200,000 new cases a day. While there are simple, tried-and-true methods that could have been used to bring the pandemic to heel — universal mask-wearing, contact tracing, and limitations on indoor gatherings — we have, as a country, given up. The Trump administration has abdicated its most basic responsibilities. The federal government could have covered rents and living expenses for affected businesses and families so that we wouldn’t have to choose between our money or our lives. But no…
