Eugene’s Silver Linings Thoughts, Third Edition: “The Elephant in the Room”

Eugene Jarecki
11 min readJun 22, 2020

Eugene Jarecki • Wednesday, March 24, 2020

I recognize with this third “Silver Linings” note that there’s an urgency to current events that makes philosophic reflection feel ill-timed — that the global imperative to flatten the curve must be everyone’s highest priority. Greta Thunberg has said as much, and she’s always right. Yet, without wishing to distract from this in any way, and with undiminished awe at the inspiring examples of the human spirit we see every day, I feel we must continue the vital work of considering the larger picture of Covid-19 from a spiritual, social, historical, and political perspective. New information is flooding at us on an hourly basis, and only through such measured reflection can we know how to think about our own decisions and actions, as well as those taken in our name over the coming months.

If you’re short on time, I will leave you with this thought: there is a tension before us, as was the case after 9/11, between liberty and security, and, just as was the case then, we must strike a delicate balance between, on the one hand, understanding the true shape of the danger we face while, on the other, not letting corrupt operators manipulate our understanding to hijack a crisis to make it serve their own privately-held goals of power, profit. and control. This has implications far beyond this moment, implications that include a necessary concern for how the pandemic may dangerously intersect with the 2020 election.

Okay, so if you read this far and gotta go, I understand. For everyone else, here’s the rest:

Writing this note, I’m conflicted between my usual impulse to think and act along progressive, solutional lines in the face of a crisis and a nagging sense that in some way, the whole point of this crisis may, for me, be precisely about NOT seeing everything in the world as something I can control or address in the way I’m accustomed to. There’s irresistible poetry for me (and I’ve heard this from many people) in thinking of Covid-19 as some kind of message from the Universe, either a wake-up call to our global system (Mother Nature says, “you must change how human society operates on my planet”) or a gut-punch to many of us that our life priorities need urgent course-correction. Personally, the virus has already given me a great deal of time to spend in quarantine with myself and loved ones, to think more introspectively, and to begin to question how, where, and with what values I live.

But this inspired vision of Covid-19’s impact relies on an interpretation of it as a “natural event.” When I hear the language of war used to characterize state and national efforts to minimize its fallout, and when such wartime language — as it often does — threatens to trample previously cherished values and liberties, I wish to cry out, “this is not a war, for if it is a war, then it’s a war against nature, and haven’t we done enough of that already?!” But then, I do have to wonder, how much of a natural event really is this? Viruses occur in nature, of course, but, as this extraordinary Vox video points out, Covid-19 is as much a man-made event as one inflicted upon man by nature. It’s a long story, but basically has to do with how a powerful lobby in Chinese society bends laws to allow for the ungodly treatment of wild game animals in the kind of “wet-markets” whence Covid-19 originated. And, in turn, how the grotesque conditions in which these animals are kept leads them to share a whole gamut of bodily fluids with one another, leading to trans-species virulence, which in turn jumps to people when the animals are slaughtered in front of their human customers. Of course, it’s already common knowledge, thanks to Jackie Chan, Yao Ming and others how powerful and corrupt Chinese interests are pushing species to extinction for the culinary, pseudo-medicinal, and sexual satisfaction of the country’s ruling elite, but Covid-19 takes this to a new level, one that began by victimizing a vast number of less well-off Chinese people before then spreading across the globe.

In a sense, while I have no interest in supporting the Racist-in-Chief’s anti-Chinese rants, which have already fueled attacks against Asian-Americans⁩, he is not entirely wrong in referring to Covid-19 as a “Chinese virus,” only insofar as it originated in horrendous conditions in a Chinese setting and, as we now know, was concealed from the world by Chinese authorities, robbing millions (if not billions) of people of precious time needed to prepare for it. Yet, whatever Chinese crimes may have helped produce and spread Covid-19, the crimes of America’s ruling class, which has eviscerated its health care system, multiplied by their leader’s hubris, willful ignorance, and utter stupidity, have made it inevitable that America will soon outstrip China as the global Covid-19 epicenter.

I raise the specter of Covid-19’s origins not to participate in China-bashing but simply to underscore the dilemma we face in whether to see the virus as a natural or man-made event. Why does this matter? And, since man is a part of nature, can we even distinguish between the two? Probably not, but in order to develop a rational framework for our response to the crisis, and to know what thoughts and actions are most needed, we must grasp the true shape and origin of it. In this case, we see a natural force, fostered and force-multiplied by manmade systems of corruption and abuse. As such, our thoughts and actions in response must be guided by a mix of both scientific-medical and socio-political understandings.

For me, as an American, I immediately turn to the larger question of how Covid-19 intersects with the elephant in the room, namely the upcoming U.S. election. For a point of comparison, I consulted a chart of the shape of the Spanish flu in terms of the number of lives it cost in Britain between June 1918 and April 1919. That sickness ultimately reached 500 million people around the world in three pandemic waves. During the first, as a national example, roughly five out of every thousand Britons lost their lives. Then, things went quiet for a few summer months, and then the second wave hit at the start of October and, by the start of November (aka Election Day), it peaked, with roughly twenty-five out of a thousand Britons losing their lives.

We are too early in Covid-19 to understand its ultimate shape, either globally or in America. Estimates of its potential loss of life range anywhere from 100,000 to 2.2 million American lives, with, most recently, the more optimistic suggestion from Nobel laureate Michael Levitt that, as he correctly predicted with China, the U.S. will soon be able to flatten its curve and overcome this viral episode. So, what then is the driving concern behind draconian measures implemented by U.S. authorities, from shelter-in-place, to border-closures and travel bans, to the engagement of the national guard in several states, to the postponing of electoral primaries? I’m not questioning the validity of these measures, any more than I might question the validity of self-quarantine and social distancing by everyone; I recognize that, in a moment where a situation seems to be spinning out of control, it’s wisest to batten down all hatches through which the virus may spread to gain a handle on things. But, looking ahead, it’s vital to ask ourselves how far we are willing to go as a society in response to Covid-19, how many of our cherished values and liberties are we willing to relinquish, and on what grounds authorities might seek to compel us to do so.

For argument’s sake, taken to an extreme, what if November rolls around, and our current Would-Be-Despot-in-Chief tells us that, contrary to his original dismissals, Covid-19 is indeed so dangerous that no one can be safe going to a polling place, and oh by the way, we really don’t have online or postal voting set up securely or comprehensively enough to ensure a true election, ‘so shucks, I guess I’ll just hold down the fort here till y’all figure that out?’ It’s an extreme example but also not entirely implausible and necessary to consider because it begs the question of how we should view the threat of Covid-19 in the larger context of past pandemics (during which social values and civil liberties may not have been irreversibly compromised).

If we are to accept a new level of government intrusion into our lives, including increased limits on our personal freedom and, as Yuval Noah Harari cautions, sovereignty over our own bodies, we need to understand the grounds on which this monumental shift would be based. Is it because experts expect Covid-19 and subsequent viruses to outstrip Spanish Flu, a virus that occurred before the concept of vaccination, let alone the capacity for a vast digitally-orchestrated global response, was even possible? Likely no. The reason thus far for the severe measures taken and proposed by authorities has to do with the perceived speed with which Covid-19 is spreading. But here again, we must ask ourselves what we are seeing. Of course, when we see New York go from roughly 2,000 cases on March 18 to almost 16,000 cases just a week later, it suggests the virus is gaining exponential speed. What is lost in the shuffle, though, is how much this is a measure of the speed of contagion and how much it’s a measure of the sudden explosion of testing in a society that, thanks to the gutting of our health care system, was caught with its pants down and is now trying to play rapid catch-up. So the 700% jump in cases may be as much (or more) a measure of our increased testing as of the virulence of Covid-19.

To underscore this, the German Covid-19 experience to date is instructive. In recent days, a mystery arose regarding why Germany’s death toll is so much lower, proportionately, than that of other countries. I was in Germany when this anomaly became evident and was experiencing its excellent medical care firsthand, so I immediately assumed it was a testament to its superior system. This was supported by the first numbers I learned, namely that Germany had at that time the capacity to test roughly 12,000 people per day, in dwarfing both Italy, which by that time had only performed 23,000 tests total and America, which had performed only 472. Germany has 25,000 ICU beds with ventilators (expanding to 35–50,000 in the coming weeks), compared with 5,000 in France, 4,000 in England, and a similar number in Italy. But when I asked German medical experts and listened to the extraordinary podcast of Dr. Christian Drosten of Charité Berlin, I got a very different picture. What I learned is that the low death toll proportion in Germany owes more to the frequency of testing than, necessarily, to a superiority in treatment. If Italy, England, or America were testing at the same pace as Germany, they would likely have a better grasp of how many in their societies were infected, and thus their overall numbers would be far higher, making their death proportion more closely resemble Germany’s. I raise this because it underscores how much testing plays a role in our perception of the severity of the crisis. For example, when speaking with German health experts, I’ve been further advised that I should perhaps not take its proportion of fatalities as any sure bet that Germany will be spared the sort of medical mayhem one now sees in Italy and expects in America and Britain.

My concern about perception merges with my fears about election security when I think back to the Spanish Flu analogy. For argument’s sake, imagine that Covid-19 likewise occurs in phases. We currently seem on track to see an exponential spike (in virulence and testing) over the coming weeks that will dangerously outstrip our undermined healthcare system’s capacity to address it. Yet, if the Hotelier-in-Chief fails in his current effort to send Americans recklessly back into business as usual, the continued good-sense of people to self-quarantine and maintain social distance may, in combination with the less virus-friendly weather of summer, lead to a flattening of the curve and, as Levitt predicts, even to an end to this phase of the pandemic. At this point, our Fearless Leader may then finally get his way and take great credit for some minor rebound in the economy as Americans return to the dangerous business as usual of cavorting with each other, whether in restaurants, offices, theaters, or stadiums. Imagine then, for a moment, that, as with the Spanish Flu, these loosened behaviors contribute to a second spike in the life of the virus. This, just coincidentally, might happen right in the weeks before Election Day, making it genuinely impossible for the nation to vote on whether its Denier-in-Chief (who likely has blood on his hands for the lives that could have been saved had he not gutted the nation’s epidemic-defenses) should win a second term. History, it seems to me, might look back on this “coronation” (pun intended), with grim bemusement.

I do not wish to generate hysteria by raising this grim prospect but rather only to remind us that Covid-19 must not distract us from the national course-correction work we face in this election year, but rather to redouble and sharpen our efforts. For Covid-19, in so many respects, speaks to all of what ails America. Just as keen observers of Hurricane Katrina were quick to point out how the flood became a kind of mighty reset button, washing away the veneer of U.S. prosperity and dredging up the centuries-old inequities and injustices of New Orleans’ checkered past, so too Covid-19 has already affirmed the central tenet of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy — the travesty that a prosperous society such as ours should have over so many of its citizens living below the poverty line and over 43 million without health coverage. I never expected to quote Britney Spears in an essay on the topic of revolutionary socio-economic change in America, but she even took to Instagram today to call for a general strike aimed at wealth redistribution in America.

Which brings me, I think, to an updated consideration of “the worst to be feared” and “best to be imagined” from my first and second “Silver Linings” posts. As the German/Austrian Zukunft-Institut (Future Institute) has this week published in their White Paper, “The Corona Effect,” there are four general scenarios they envision for how the world may shift after Corona, ranging from, worst-case, a pessimistic shift toward the disconnection of tribalism to, second-worst, a pessimistic global shift toward increased nationalism and xenophobia, to, second-best, an optimistic shift toward local and tribal self-identity, to, best-case, an optimistic shift toward interconnected globalism. Wherever our destiny lies among these options will be hugely shaped by how we, as citizens, approach the decisions and actions that will unfold during this crucial year, including, with significance that cannot be overstated, a vigilance on the intersection between Covid-19 and the historic 2020 election.

Until next time, stay safe, mindful, and kind. ❤️

- Eugene

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Eugene Jarecki

Eugene Jarecki is a filmmaker and activist. He co-Chairs the Election Super Centers Project, with over 70 arenas and stadiums across America now open for voting