But any comparisons of war strategy, troop movement or foreign presence need to stop with the period of this sentence. Because the lesson of Afghanistan is not the lesson of Vietnam (assuming either can be reduced to a singular moral).
Ken Burns’ 10-part series on Vietnam underscored the threat of exporting morality. Namely, the American lifestyle.
Afghanistan is a lesson on importing morality. Namely, religion.
Theists will cry in protest, I know. I think I can hear them now, just under the shrill din of anti-vaxers. Those are Muslims, not Christians, I hear them caterwaul. And what about Hindus and Buddhists,you ignorant slut?
To which I say, good question. But did you have to ask it so rudely? Asshole.
What was I saying? Oh yeah! Lesson.
This is the lesson. Religion poisons everything. Everything.
Those people beating down the doors of Kabul? They are believers, like Christians. Those people enforcing their own mask mandate (in the form of burkas)? They think they know the word of God, like Jews. What we’re seeing are just jersey and coaching changes on Team Abraham.
And as for the Buddhists, the Hindus, and anyone else who believes the universe has your best interest in mind: You are part of the problem. That reasoning is why the the Earth overheats and why beatable diseases linger and grow. The debate is no longer about accountability; it’s about degree of complicity.
Only in a Trump America would curing a disease widen ts spread.
I call it a Trump America because his presidency, like herpes, was apparently a permanent infection that could return at any time. His slackwittery continues to echo in the halls of Congress and the backwaters of the nation’s collective intellect.
Need proof? Just look at the country’s COVID numbers. Despite a vaccine, conservatives treat the cure like the metric system: ‘Not in my school or home, smartass college boy.”
This is what that thinking looks like.
The reaction to four million dead worldwide (two-thirds to legit genocide!) has given news outlets the vapors. Fox News suggests wrapping yourself in a flag and punching a tree for symptoms of a pandemic. CNN and MSNBC recommend fucking a celebrity.
I propose something simpler: treating COVID for what it has become, America’s new smoking.
Need proof? That, too, is in the numbers. According to the CDC, 480,000 Americans still die from smoking every year. Another 42,000 die annually from second-hand smoke.
Yet, is there an American alive today who does not know that smoking is a deadly behavior? This despite the advent of vaping, which has led to a total of 60 deaths since its creation. It suggests that people are addicted to the ritual of smoking, not the nicotine.
We are choosing to die.
It’s what this country is great at. Suicides outpace homicides every year three-to-one (about 45,000 suicides a year compared to about 15,000 murders). Approximately 100,000 people die annually in drunk driving crashes. One in 10 Americans has adult-onset diabetes.
Welcome to the Actuarial Club, COVID. You join some heavy hitters.
So let’s start treating the pandemic like other American killers: as a matter of choice, a macabre decision exacerbated by political charlatans and medical hucksters who know the cash in conspiracy. Those who roundly reject the vaccine — and the science behind it — are telling us clearly they’d rather live in flavor country.
You got it. You have that right, just as you have the right to smoke in the car with your infant strapped down. And, like your smoking, you’ll have to practice breathing in your own space. Just as we bar smokers from theaters, hospitals and nursery schools, we’ll have to separate the unvaccinated from the vaccinated.
And that couldn’t be easier. It won’t require banning a soul, castigating a fool, or suffering a moron.
Simply treat vaccinations like organ donation. Just as you can indicate that you want to be an organ donor on your driver’s license, we need the option to indicate we’ve taken the vaccine. The government needs to formally recognize vaccinations beyond the record you received that somehow is not wallet sized. Corporate America would welcome and enforce it: Unless you’re a gun shop, lethal stupidity is bad for business.
To placate critics, you’d have an opt-out choice identical to organ donation: do nothing. That’s what you’re doing anyway.
More importantly, there is an opt-in clause, which is really the only option for clarity in a Trump America, where you have the god-given right to be wrong.
So don’t worry, Gov. Ron DeSantis. No one is going to Fauci your Florida.
We have a new medical expert for you. One even Dr. Fauci would admit is more qualified to speak on the pandemic.
Everyone gets a Santa moment. Actually, we get two, but most of us opt out of the second.
The first is pretty simple and usually comes at a younger age (I think I was 38). That epiphany, either discovered or disclosed, that there is no globular elf holed up at the North Pole who jacks a team of flying deer every year to reverse-burgle your home.
The second seems almost as straightforward. But adults are much more reluctant to give up the notion of their Santa: an otherworldly patriarch who sees you while you’re sleeping, knows when you’re awake, and knows if you’ve been bad or good, so watch your ass for good chrissakes.
Growing up in an atheistic home, I’m a carnival mirror of my father’s skepticism. So I can’t say I understand the appeal of omnipresence. But even from this secular perch, I guess the lure is to be expected. Christianity — like all Abrahamic religions — is an Iron Age tradition that served as a proto-science for centuries. Recalibrating that perspective will be a glacial thaw — if it happens at all.
But the nation clearly has drawn too hard on the Coca Cola Slurpee, because we are in the middle of an Arctic brain freeze that has numbed our need for things like proof or evidence. Our penchant for fact-free daydreaming has run amok in America’s most pressing issues: the pandemic and politics.
It’s been hard to tell the two apart lately. Roughly half of Americans are vaccinated, according to polls. That’s in leage with the percentage of people who believe the presidential election was rigged.
Of course, 60% of Americans also report having personally witnessed a ghost, according to a 2018 survey of Groupon users, of all things. So there’s that.
There’s a name for that kind of thinking. It’s called Unethical Epistemology.
Ethical Epistemology holds that it’s immoral to believe in something for which there is no evidence.
It sounds like a harsh worldview, and it does go counter to our instincts about religion, the supernatural, even gut instinct. And it underscores why so many people are hesitant to embrace science.
For the first 5,000 years of our existence, the world was full of living spirits. Gods and demons fought over our seas and crops. Animals held human interests. The stars kept us in mind.
We were not alone.
And along comes science, the ultimate buzzkill. You are on your own, science scolds, nixing gods like Zeus and Poseidon and fucking up our horoscope (though, to be fair, it did say you would face a challenge this month).
For some of us, that news is like the school’s-out bell the last day before summer. Or finding the keys to the liquor cabinet before Mom and Dad’s Carnival cruise. The place is yours! YOU set the party rules. YOU decide how loud the music plays. YOU set bedtimes, if you want them at all.
YOU are Santa.
But for a sizable chunk of the populace — perhaps the bulk of it — that’s unwelcome news and an unwanted job. Critics of Ethical Epistemology rightly point out that religious scaffolding has kept us primates largely in check for millennia. There’s that, too.
So where do we find a shared-upon reality? How do we fix a car if we can’t agree on whether it’s a Buick or a BMW?
Fortunately, if you’re an Ethical Epistemologist like me, there’s an easy test to determine if you’re with an unethical one. Simply work in an innocent question like “what about that COVID?” or “what about that election?” Any answer will lead to their belief. It won’t change any minds, but at least you’ll know the mind your dealing with.
There has got to be a brokered ground somewhere that resides other than in Tucker Carlson’s venomous spittle or Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s space laser-addled brain. They — and their parroting ilk — must be challenged on matters of basic veracity.
But at some point, all of us, regardless of political leanings, must question the beliefs that undergird our own convictions.
Because if the kids are left to decide the Santa moment, we’ll all be getting lumps of coal.
