COVID-19 AND THE AMERICAN CLIMAX / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

COVID-19 and the American Climax

Thoughts in and around geopolitics.

By George Friedman 

On Tuesday, I received my first COVID-19 vaccine dose by driving over 100 miles to Waco, Texas, to a CVS Pharmacy where the vaccine was available and where I was able to get an appointment. 

On the way home, the radio announced that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had ruled that Texas would abandon the precautions, including wearing face masks and other social distancing measures that had been in place. 

All businesses are free to open at 100 percent or whatever capacity they chose. 

This comes a couple of weeks after Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, said in response to a question that Americans may still need to wear masks in 2022, despite the fact that all who want the vaccine would have been vaccinated by then. 

At the same time, a controversy is raging over opening schools. 

Some argue that keeping children out of school for an extended period disrupts their social development – that without in-person interactions with other children, youths will suffer social dysfunction. Teachers unions argue that reopening schools would leave teachers vulnerable to infection and endanger lives.

It has now been more than a year since the first reported COVID-19 death in the United States and since officials, lacking either an effective treatment or a vaccine for the disease, attempted to craft a solution. 

The solution they came up with was to dramatically change our behavior toward one another. 

It didn’t work very well, as half a million people died in the United States. 

Proponents argue that had the public universally and rigorously followed the protocols, it would have worked far better. 

But the public didn’t follow the protocols, and there was no chance they would. 

The American public tends to resist government instructions and has a robust sense of distrust. 

The American public is very good at breaking the rules to find new ways of doing things. 

This is its virtue, and it – as with most virtues – is likely to become a vice.

The solution proposed was never going to be more than a poorly honored stopgap. 

At the same time, the medical establishment had nothing else to offer. 

No reliable treatment and no vaccine meant that the behavioral shift, running as it did against the grain of American non-conformism, would not prevent massive casualties, though it did limit them. 

A half-million dead is just mitigation, but we can imagine even more catastrophic numbers had even less been done.

Now, one year in, the medical community is proposing that masks continue to be worn after the vaccine renders you near-immune to the disease and nearly unable to transmit it. 

For the medical community, this is a minor inconvenience, an add-on preventative. 

But in real life there is a price. My glasses fog up while reading. 

More important, humans do not simply communicate with words. 

They communicate with smiles and frowns and an endless array of expressions that cannot be readily seen through a mask. 

And it is those unsaid but eloquent facial gestures, gestures using our mouths, that reveal so much. 

Masks hide them and they cloud my vision, so wearing a mask is not without costs.

On the other hand, the United States has lost half a million lives, and if we keep it to only that there is a victory. 

We have been warned about the danger of abandoning the safety protocols, however imperfect. And it is a reasonable thought. 

But we have been in this condition for a year, and Dr. Fauci is speaking of being in it for another year. 

There is of course a massive economic effect, which is frequently brushed off as the necessary price for safety. 

But the economic crisis is not merely a discomfort. It is something that has destroyed the fabric of the lives of many of the poor or those not so poor. 

Vast portions of our society fight every day for their livelihoods and for the futures of their children. 

Many lost that fight last year. There are no statistics about lost hopes. You can live yet have lost the hope that fueled you.

There is the social cost of increased family violence, of psychological failure, of grandparents not able to visit grandchildren, of children not learning to play with each other, of people not meeting the one who would have been their spouse. 

The list goes on, and it is more than an abstraction. 

There is death, and there is the diminished and distorted life. 

Both are real, and neither is trivial.

The medical experts have done their best. 

I do not for a second doubt it. 

They found a temporary solution, created vaccines in staggering time and risked their lives in hospitals filled with the infected. 

There was nothing else they could do. 

It takes nothing away from the medical establishment when we say that there was a real and sometimes unseen cost to the only solution we had. 

Nor does it take anything away from them to say that the pressure to move on is surging.

Doctors may not sense this but politicians do. 

That is why we have them. 

They are the invaluable seismograph not only of the public mood but of public necessity. Texas is an unruly state, and Texans are surly to those who impose rules against their will. 

They are, or some are, reckless. 

Abbott governs this state, not Massachusetts, which is as culturally different from Texas as many nations are from each other. 

Abbott knew something that the governors of other states and the medical experts didn’t grasp, which is that for many, time and patience are running out. 

And he knew, as I have seen, that in Texas, masks and social distancing are being discarded, and that reimposing the rigors of the past was not an option. 

Resisting the rising tide of those who loathe the steps taken to save lives, he decided to lead something that was going to happen anyway. 

He declared that next week, virtually all the disciplines of the past year would end.

Abbott spoke of declining case numbers and of vaccines (though still rare), and of the fact that the worst is over. 

He may be right – epidemics die out, and he is looking at the numbers to make this claim. Or cases and deaths may surge in Texas. 

But the claim is not the key. 

The key is that we have spent a year hunkered down and it can’t go on – or at least that is the emerging public view, of the economically and socially devastated as well as of the impatient few. 

The truth will emerge in a few weeks, and I certainly don’t know what it will be.

Humans divide into two camps. 

There are those who, when in danger, are certain that they will die. 

And there are those who, when in danger, are certain others will die but they won’t. 

The fear of death is the mystery of human life, as is the sense of invincibility. 

The fear of death motivates people to get the vaccine and continue the protocols to fight the disease. 

The belief in invincibility motivates those who will not take the vaccine to deny the danger. 

And then there are those who crouch and wait for instructions. 

Dr. Fauci said we might be waiting another year. 

Abbott said the time is now. 

Both are good men, doing jobs that must be done. 

And as this crisis ends, we will be looking at all the victims of the disease who did not catch the virus.

In the end, COVID-19 will not be annihilated. 

We will live with it as we live with all other diseases and dangers. 

It will have made a spectacular entrance and will resolve itself as one of the many things we have to worry about.