I’m going to try to keep this as uncontroversial as I can. Chalk it up as an opinion piece and not so much “this is the way it is and you have to believe me.”
A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video made by a vlogger (video blogger) I follow. He’s an American living in China, and the focus of his video was a rant against the US president and his knowledge that Covid-19 was actually much more serious than he had led the country to believe back in February of 2020.
And his rant could very well be justified – he had some excellent points, but they certainly weren’t hard to find. I’ve spent all of my adult life around leaders. I have been trained in leadership and have risen to lead many myself. And from what I know, you can be assured that the president is not a good leader at all. Good leaders lead. They know how to tell people the truth without the sugar-coating, and on a stage where countless lives are going to be dramatically affected if you aren’t telling the truth, that’s pretty important.
But one of the approaches the vlogger used to argue against the president was to praise the example being set by the Chinese right now. The government did what was needed to bring the virus under control. They were responsive. They had the tools in place to handle any outbreaks quickly. And he showed us, right there on his phone, an app that tracked active cases and alerted citizens on a green / yellow / red scale (depending on risk and proximity) if someone who had been near you was infected.
And wow, that was really cool. Except for the chilling admission that the Chinese government tracks your every movement (not to mention has access to all of your information) through your phone. Maybe you don’t have a problem with that – and a lot of people don’t. But the question has always been – and this is where the American people will be stubbornly insistent – where are we going to draw the line?
And here’s where it’s getting quirky. I believe the president has been incompetent in his leadership when dealing with the virus – I mean, as I write this, the story breaks that he can’t even protect himself from it, let alone the nation. But did 200,000 people die because of the way he handled it? In reality, no. Some of those – probably even a good portion of those – would have died regardless. But maybe (just to pick a number) we would only have lost 180,000 if he had done things differently. I’m not saying at all that 20,000 fewer deaths is insignificant — I’m just saying that we have no way of knowing. For all we know, he could have done something somewhere else that saved 10,000 others.
But there’s one thing that we must not do – and this should be an especially obvious point in light of the fact that many believe that the president is an incompetent narcissist – we must not cede our freedom to the government that is headed by that very same incompetent narcissist. Or anyone else for that matter.
We should have learned that lesson from the aftermath of 9/11, when the government decided to give something like that a test run. In the shock of the times, the American people willingly watched their government broaden its control, calling it the “Patriot Act,” in the name of protecting us from terrorists. Over the years, we have discovered that perhaps they did a little too much because, after all, what exactly is a “terrorist”? The answer could turn out to be quite convenient to whomever decided to use that control, and we’ve seen examples of what happens when someone buried in the bureaucracy decides they’re going with the definition that fits their agenda best.
What I fear now though is that we’ll soon face a new brand of control — a “Political Patriot Act.” I think we’ve heard the rumbles of it already – a political backlash to the past 4 years to make sure “something like this” never happens again. “Get rid of the Electoral College.” “Stack the Supreme Court.” Change the rules, and if we fail again, it was the Russians’ fault. Remember, “we are experiencing a crisis unlike any the country has ever faced!”
But the problem is, of course, the definition of the “this” in “something like this.” Right now we might have a pretty clear idea, but what about ten years down the line when the “this” becomes a group of people protesting outside the White House? And what political party is going to ride in to the rescue when the “this” is one of the parties (and its ignorant supporters) itself?
Let me remind you here: I have a deep disdain for both political parties. But I think one could be more dangerous than the other. Why? Because one’s underhandedness is fairly open and obvious. Their platform is to create power and wealth by stacking the deck, and they let you know it. But they get away with it because they also dangle the hope that “you too will get your piece of the pie” in front of the noses of the electorate.
But the other has exactly the same goals. What makes them more dangerous is that they hide it better. They amass their power and wealth, but their carrot is the hope that the government will be the one giving you your piece of the pie. In the end though, no matter who’s in charge, it’s business as usual. A bunch of people in a bureaucracy that simply want to stay in power, and they’ll do anything they can to keep it that way. It’s a kind of game to them where none of the pieces actually move. Each side needs the other simply as a target for blame and as a monster to keep the kids scared. Each president is the previous president’s fault. And the extremes of which we must be afraid are simply energy for the next swing of the pendulum.
I say this to re-emphasize my position that smaller is better. Our constitution was designed for a federal government that was to conduct foreign policy and defense on behalf of the nation while the people tended to their own affairs, electing those locally who would be directly accountable to the people they govern. It has drifted far from that ideal, where now our lives are governed by far away, “elected” officials who are actually more beholden to those in proximity with the power and money to buy their allegiance.
But we are indeed at a turning point that matters, and we may soon be fortunate enough to end this disgusting moment in history where a “leader” represents only a small segment of the people but is able to rely on others’ loyalty to a party to carry him the rest of the way. And yet I fear something worse in the aftermath. I fear a replacement so pressured to make sure nothing like “this” ever happens again that it will stack the deck against ordinary Americans who are caught in the middle; those who would normally be more than willing to be reasonable. As I ponder this, I can’t help but recall images of people literally screaming in anguish over the results of the 2016 election. I can’t help but remember the pile of celebrities who openly threatened violence in profanity-laced tirades. I can’t help but recall hearing sitting members of Congress calling on people to relentlessly harass and bully those with whom they disagreed.
And I can assure you that the people of these sentiments will step to the forefront of political action once this election is over: to extreme violence should the president win reelection, or extreme revenge should he lose. Either way, we all lose.
This leads me back to the comments of the vlogger that started this post. When I see the president’s challenger speak with passion and anger claiming that the his actions were responsible for the deaths of 200,000, I can agree with him only in part – it is easy to recognize that this could have been handled with more intelligence and compassion and unity. One thing I cannot accept though is that “if only our incompetent government headed by a fool had stepped up to implement a system like that used by China, we’d all be safer right now.” Not now…and not when the current president is long gone.
We will survive this pandemic. And we will survive this president. But we should think very hard if we believe we could survive that.
