This isn’t intended to be gratuitous dude-bashing. My Y chromosome is a pre-existing condition that fundamentally shapes me, and I’m pretty darn fond of myself. While I sometimes half-heartedly try to avoid some forms of my innate Neanderthal-ness, it seems pretty baked into my DNA. I scratch inappropriately. I groom only sporadically. I mansplain with the worst of them.
But this business about men not social distancing in the Covid-19 Era is embarrassingly stupid and/or arrogant, even for us. An Altarum survey tells the tale: Nearly one-quarter (24%) of men say they are going to public spaces “a lot” or “far more than usual,” compared to only 10% of women.
Why? Confronted about going to a public place with Covid-19 cases increasing rapidly, I can predict the reaction of many of my male friends. A smirk. A shrug of the shoulders. A devil may care twinkle of the eye. “You can’t live your life afraid of everything,” they’ll say. “If it’s my time, it’s my time.”
For those of you who don’t speak Dude-ish, allow me to translate what these guys are trying to convey to the world: “I’m a bad ass. I’m courageous.”
Obviously, in this context, this is complete and utter bullshit. Yes, courage sometimes means going into dangerous situations, and public gatherings in the middle of a pandemic are dangerous. But let’s be real, fellas. You’re going to the dangerous situations to get yourself a beer, laugh, a corporate brownie point, or a thrill, not to rescue someone.
Going into these dangerous situations for those reasons isn’t rushing into the smoke. It’s more like what suicide bombers do to themselves and innocents.
As has been widely reported, Covid-19 is often carried by people who are asymptomatic or lightly symptomatic, so none of us knows who has the lethal germ-bomb duct-taped to our chest. Walking into public gatherings armed with that knowledge isn’t remotely courageous. It’s either ignorant or deplorably self-centered.
So fellow dudes, you won’t catch me scolding you for your utterly defensible scratching decisions. But could we get just this life-and-death decision right?
I’ve come to realize that I’ve been partially wrong about Governor Tim Walz. Based on what I had seen pre-pandemic, I had him pegged as a politically cautious guy who inevitably gravitated towards a relatively modest “split-the-difference” caretaker agenda. From a progressive’s standpoint, he seemed like a competent Governor, but far from a bold one.
Often Cautious
After all, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Walz had exhibited an abundance of caution that wasn’t comforting to progressives. For instance, Walz came into office proposing an exciting MinnesotaCare Buy-In Option for Minnesotans who can’t get health coverage from employers or the government. Progressives cheered. But Walz didn’t seem to fight particularly visibly or hard for it.
Likewise, Walz has expressed support for legalization of marijuana for adults. Again, progressives cheered. But Walz rarely uses anything close to the full measure of his powerful “bully pulpit” and political influence to move public opinion on that key social justice issue.
In the 2019 session, Walz wanted to raise much more revenue to deliver improved services. Instead, he ended up with lower overall revenue. He caved relatively quickly to Republican demands and walked away without one penny of the gas tax increase he sought, while giving Republicans an income tax cut and a 10% cut in the provider tax, which is needed to fund health care programs.
At a time when DFLers controlled the House and the Governor’s office, the GOP-controlled Senate somehow was given a”no new taxes” outcome that would make Tim Pawlenty proud, and Governor Walz declared victory.
Why has Walz been so cautious? My theory is that he is so infatuated with his “One Minnesota” sloganeering from his 2018 campaign that he has been afraid to challenge conservatives and moderates in rural areas of the state.
Bold On Pandemic Response
However, lately Walz has been under heavy fire from those rural Minnesotans about his wise decision to close bars and restaurants statewide. Since most Minnesota counties still have few or no coronavirus cases, the bar and restaurant closures strike short-sighted rural Minnesotans as overkill, and Republican politicians are always all too happy to encourage rural victimhood and resentment.
“While we understand the necessity of Governor Walz to lead in this time of crisis, that leadership should not be unilateral and unchecked,” (Republican Senate Majority Leader Paul) Gazelka said in a statement.
Several lawmakers, all Republicans, have expressed concerns about the impact of Walz’s orders on small businesses in their towns in Greater Minnesota.
“The governor’s order puts these small businesses in an impossible position,” state Sen. Scott Newman, R-Hutchinson, said in a statement addressing the closings in the hospitality industry. “These small businesses, and their many hourly wage earners, will undoubtedly suffer because of this order. I urge the governor to reconsider the financial impact of his order on small business owners that concurrently has the potential to make them criminals for simply trying to earn a living.”
To his credit, on pandemic response issues Walz has consistently put public health above politics. He understood that ordering closures on a partial county-by-county basis would be unfair and ineffective. After all, irresponsible citizens in counties were restaurants and bars were closed would simply travel across county borders to eat and drink out, which would create new pandemic hot-spots in previously uncontaminated Minnesota counties.
Thanks to Walz’s leadership, on March 24 Minnesota ranked in the top ten of states with the most aggressive policies for limiting the rapid spread of coronavirus. A lot has changed since these rankings came out, but Walz seems very likely to issue a shelter-in-place order sometime this week, which should keep Minnesota relatively high in the rankings.
It would be tempting for Walz to view restaurant and bar closing through a short-term political lens, as the Governors in red states such as Wyoming, Mississippi, Texas, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Missouri seem to be doing. It would be easier to keep some or all of Minnesota’s bars and restaurants open, and let other states leaders do the heavy lifting when it comes to pandemic management.
But Walz isn’t taking that politically expedient approach, and the economic and political fallout from all of this could potentially cost him his political career.
I certainly hope that doesn’t happen, but if it does, it’s a relatively small price to pay to prevent Minnesota hospital patients from suffering the kind of horrific meltdowns being seen in Italy, where physicians are reportedly forced to deny care to suffocating people over 60 because of lack of medical capacity.
Trying to avoid scenes like that are well worth whatever political price Walz pays. Here’s hoping that the newly self-quarantined Governor stays healthy, and that a plurality of Minnesotans will eventually appreciate his impressive display of political courage at this crucial moment in Minnesota history.
Among all the odd things I find myself obsessing over in this, um, interesting moment are the basic laws of evolutionary biology. Namely what every individual cell does (or does not do) to survive attack and crisis and thereby advance its DNA into another generation. The story of evolution, (which — much to my point here — a large number of Americans don’t believe in), is a multi-billion year saga of trial and error. A few winners. Lots of losers.
Sped up from the pure microbiologic level to mammals, there’s been a lot of deeper understanding since Charles Darwin on the ways packs and tribes of “advanced” species, (individuals themselves composed of roiling colonies of cells}, screw the pooch. How? By failing to adapt to high-peril changes in their environment or … by entrusting their survival to leaders, think “alpha apes”, who prove too weak or insufficiently wily (i.e. intelligent) to beat back an attack by another tribe, or adapt to change.
You can see where I’m going here. But it isn’t just Donald Trump, although god knows his narcissistic-to-the-point-of-sociopathic incompetence has been confirmed in granite by this epic debacle.
The decision 63,000,000 of our pack/tribe made in 2016 when they voted for Trump was based heavily on a popular but deeply-flawed misconception that all government, really any government, is incompetent, corrupt and fundamentally untrustworthy. A drag on our freedoms and wildly too expensive. This is a message that is essential to the modern conservative movement. From Ronald Reagan to Rush Limbaugh, from The Freedom Caucus to “Fox & Friends.” To quote Grover Norquist, “I just want to shrink [government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
This self-defeating fallacy explains as well as anything why preparations for a pandemic, not at all a sci-fi improbability in a fully inter-connected world population, have been under-funded and eradicated entirely when they haven’t simply been ignored. These are the agencies dismissed as “wasteful social programs” and are therefore routinely and fairly easily under-funded or shuttered by conservative politicians. (Usually as a way of making some sense of the government books relative to another massive tax relief package for wealthy donors.)
We’ve learned in recent days that despite wasting three months since the first outbreak of the “foreign virus”, there hasn’t been even the most minimal marshalling of testing equipment and facilities (and national protocols) in case, you know, something did go wrong. Put in basic, conservative business terms: no contingency planning at all.
This is how tribes perish. By blindly accepting and following ignorant, incompetent leadership’s utterly false narrative. Ergo: no preparation for a life or death crisis.
So in this context, as we sort out how to prevent this from happening again, it’s worth discussing what are — truly — the fundamental matters of defense of the pack/tribe?
Put another way, what is “defense” today, for 21st century America? Is it really preparing for a full-out military attack from Russia, a mafia-style kleptocracy that remains in business solely because of unpredictable oil sales to western markets? Or is it China? Where we are required to believe they would for some reason attack their primary customer base, the primary engine of their economy?
Or is the real “threat” over the next 20-30 years, considering climate change and the ever-increasing human/wildlife interface, the much higher likelihood of a truly fatal, plague-like contagion, killing millions instead of “just” thousands?
