Coronavirus (COVID19) Reflection #8
SOCIAL DISTANCING
A Short dissertation today
Why it can’t work.
Social distancing can work to assure that human to human transfers of all manner of communicable ills is not spread. That part of disease resolution is patently and obviously true. What can’t work is human survival for any length of time among those who were ill-prepared or financed for such distancing. The systems of economy, medicine, and even religion, across almost all cultures, are not set up to provide compassionate relief at no cost for any but the shortest of times. And weeks and months are not part of any of their ‘help’ policies, plans or provisions.
So, what if the Coronavirus is limited to the point where it expires from old age or warm weather? What difference does the expiry make if societies are destroyed in the process if deep individual depressions become group depressions if the people starve and are cast out because social systems were never designed to support weakness, but to eliminate, suppress or ignore it, and cannot be adapted or changed quick enough to avoid disaster; what then?
Social distancing, as a very immediate and local solution, can be enforced, but social distancing over time offers only a very simple and stark solution, best described by a very famous quote: “give me liberty or give me death.”
