The cruelty of numbers

Every evening I check the coronavirus numbers to see how the world is doing and, being who I am and how I am, part of what I am doing is keeping score. I think we've all been doing it. Who's doing better, blue states or red states? On what metric (growth rate, incidence in population, mortality....) Alternately, US vs the world. Lockdown Europe vs. Sweden. It's hard not to. Part of me is a numbers guy, and these are a lot of numbers, and fresh ones every day, a new set of metrics by which to judge the world.

But this is ultimately not a productive enterprise, and it is asking the wrong questions in the wrong way. I -- and perhaps we - all too easily lose sight of the really big picture - which is that a lot of people are dying our there, a lot of others are hungry, and a lot of people (many of whom are the same ones who are hungry) are having the arcs of their lives disrupted in a really nasty way as their means of earning a living and commune with loved ones and neighbors are taken from them.

Before coronavirus settled on our shores partisanship and the atomization of society were already huge problems and we all knew it. In my heart of hearts -- and I think I am not alone in this -- I hoped that a crisis might descend upon us -- like WWII -- to give us a shared purpose. The arrival of COVID provided us with this opportunity, and for a very brief moment it felt like we might be able to make use of it.

Then things erupted. For people in blue places, it's easy to lay the blame on the Reopeners. When they showed up in Raleigh and Lansing with big-assed guns and rocket launchers and wrenches bigger than any I had ever seen, it was difficult not to be appalled, though I understood where they were coming from. Unfortunately, the echo chamber of Facebook, the too-politicized news landscape and its chief booster, our jackass Tweeter in Chief -- caused use to focus on our rage. Imagine if, instead, the Reopeners had left their guns at home and the three major news networks had dispatched the likes of Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw or Cokie Roberts to talk to the Reoperners. Things might have evolved rather differently.

Upon reflection, I think that, from the point of view of the political fabric, the big mistake the Reopeners made was taking firearms to their protests. If they hadn't, it would have been difficult not to respect their exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Even if we had doubts about the epidemiological wisdom of gathering as they did. It was the combining of First and Second Amendment rights that got us worked up. But, of course, by the logic of 2020, when it's all about getting attention to get one's message out, bringing guns is the right thing to do because it stirs passions.

But it doesn't need to be this way, and it needn't continue on this way. We have the option suggested to us, as I have written before, by Bunuel's Exterminating Angel. We just need to get up and walk out.