How can we ignore gun violence and COVID deaths? Self-interest rules America

Over the past few weeks, Americans have been subjected to every measure of national welfare. Inflation is said to be down to 5% he said. Job opportunities are increasing. Our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will be the same as those imaginary numbers indicate.like the new america has It pointed out,”[O]Our dominant reports on GDP, unemployment and inflation fail to capture the full picture of well-being, which may consider factors such as access to care and the impact of climate change. … When policy decisions are based on the wrong indicators, we ignore important factors that affect well-being. ”

Of course, there are many ways to assess health. In my view, however, he cannot ignore two phenomena peculiar to America when assessing American well-being. gun violence and death of the elderly from COVID. why?

It is not a new idea that the well-being of a society is most clearly seen in the care it shows or does not show to its most vulnerable members. Hubert Humphrey many years ago As said, “The moral test of government is how it treats people in the early days of life, children, people in the twilight of life, the elderly, people in the shadows of society. Life, the sick, the needy, the handicapped.”

By leaving the most vulnerable among us unprotected from shootings and pandemics, our politics will reveal what happened. It is the political expression of the larger culture of extravagant self-absorption.

The recent shooting of three children at a school in Nashville, Tennessee, and the shooting of four children (with more than 20 injuries) at a “sweet 16” birthday party in Alabama, It highlights the harsh reality that exists only in the United States among relatively developed countries. leading cause of death For children under 20, it is not an illness, malnutrition or accident. It’s a bullet wound.

according to According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, firearms kill 5.6 out of 100,000 American children ages 3 to 18. No other developed country comes close. The closest is Canada, where 0.8 of her 100,000 children die in shootings. According to Kaiser’s Multinational Survey, 97% of his gun deaths were by American children.

Our record in responding to COVID is equally dire. First place On the eve of the pandemic, in November 2019, among the 177 countries with pandemic-response capacity, the U.S. ranked last among the wealthiest nations and had the highest infection and death rates among all nations. close to the bottom.

Why have we been so far less successful than other countries that seem less prepared? Some people like to point it out. In the early months of COVID, when it became clear that the virus was being spread by asymptomatic people, the only way to protect the most vulnerable among us was regular and universal It was to test the pandemic to contain it, isolate it, and slow, if not stop its spread. Instead, we chose to fly blind from the start. With the administration’s decision to only track hospitalizations in early 2022, with no universal testing adopted, it was never possible to know how widespread the virus was in the population.

universal test? TRUE? Honestly, who are we kidding? Any effort to carry out universal testing would have sparked ideological outrage that made the anti-masking, anti-distancing and anti-vaccination messages seem tame in comparison. It would have been likened to China. Attempts to track the virus in real time and control its spread would have been seen as a pretext for unprecedented surveillance of the average American. It would have been said to control “us, the people”, rather than control.

So I haven’t tested it. Nor are we, as a nation, committed to masking or distancing or, for that matter, vaccination. have essentially chosen to pretend not to threaten – and for 84% of us we are largely right. There are deaths every day, mostly drawn from the remaining 16% of the population, the elderly. their deaths dismissed. It is currently responsible for 90% of the world’s highest mortality rates. America only.

We failed to protect our children from the shootings and our seniors from the pandemic. Because our response to both is not based on a quest for the most effective and practical means to protect the most vulnerable, but on the ideology of narcissism. The point is not “what you, my neighbor, might need”, but “what I want”. Our core first principle — leave me alone to do what I want — insulates our views from interrogation by the realities of shooting and disease. form of individualism. It is freedom distorted by persistent, short-sighted self-interest.

It also goes against the attitude of our Constitutional Framers, and the structure and spirit of the documents and amendments they have adopted, despite the rising Supreme Court dogma. Our Constitution is structured to call for compromise. In its absence, a structure with various checks and balances is a prescription for paralysis. Without pragmatism, our systems are structured to fail. Moreover, the touchstone of our Bill of Rights is not the feared assertion of absolute entitlement to the slippery slopes of erosion, but rather the adjustment of the degree of governmental interference with the severity of the threats we face. But weighing the rationality of government actions against threats to the masses is precisely what the ideological response to mass shootings and COVID, and for that matter, to any problem, precludes. is.

In other words, our problems are cultural, the product of years of relentless commercial discourse as our dominant cultural force. , by solidifying our attitudes into ideologies, realizing that our commercial culture has polluted our politics and led us astray.

John Farmer Jr. is the director of Eagleton Political Institute at Rutgers University. He is a former U.S. Attorney General, New Jersey Governor’s Attorney, New Jersey Attorney General, Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission, Rutgers He is Dean of the School, Executive of Rutgers University He is Vice His President I also serve as a legal advisor.