MAY 2, 2020 – Perhaps you and I see the same images. Perhaps we don’t, for we live in the Disunited States of America. In any case, witness gun-toting protesters in Michigan and beach crowds in California. “What?” They say. “A killer virus is afoot? It’ll take time . . . and patience . . . to avoid becoming a patient (or worse)? Show me the money! Shower me and my closely gathered friends with sunshine! Oh, and NOW! (And don’t lecture me about grammar—this is the country where “me” always comes first!)”
We’re a whole culture of now, a culture of “Don’t Tread on Me!” . . . a culture of impatience.
With the exception of West African slaves (and of course, the indigenous tribes), the people who settled here possessed impatience more than any other trait. Migrants to America were previously bound by rules, traditions, limitations of one sort or another. Whether for lucre or liberty, people fed up with one thing or another found passage to the New Order. In their impatience they built bright shiny objects and called the heap, “the shining city on the hill.” From a distance it gleamed. Upon closer inspection, the blinding light . . . well, blinded them to the risk of putting solo success ahead of long-term viability.
Now, in the face of a common enemy far more insidious, destructive, and unpredictable than a band of extremists that for a fleeting time caused us to say, “United We Stand,” we’ve become antsy, impertinent, and . . . impatient. To hell with the next guy, “Me and my friends have to [golf, eat out, play on the beach, shop till we drop, and swagger around with assault weapons]. Oh yeah, and we need to get back to work to pay for everything—the stuff we need and most important, the extra stuff we want.”
The trade-off between pandemic control and economic damage is measured on a false scale—impatience with controls because of the damage they will cause ensures even greater future damage. As in so many other human endeavors, obsession with short-term gain will produce long-term loss. Our impatience condemns us to successive waves of pandemic disruption and destruction—within the health care industry, manufacturing, food supply chains, and other labor markets. Our impatience consigns us to a chronically depressed economy, from which it will take a generation to recover.
In the earliest years of our culture, impatience gave birth to militant freedom. “Don’t Tread on Me [or my guns]!” might have been a workable battle cry when genocide of an indigenous people was as acceptable as enslavement of a kidnapped race; when the land was to be grabbed and exploited as fast as a flintlock could be loaded, an ax could be swung, a horse could be ridden; when the total population of the United States was a tiny fraction of its current size. In today’s world, “Don’t Tread on Me!” has become, “Let Me Tread on You!”
Where individual freedom becomes an individual sledge-hammer, freedom renders us . . . free to destroy ourselves.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
