With pandemic death toll nearing 1 million, stand against Covid misinformation

Editor:

It’s time to stand straight and true.

Roman authors utilized the ritual slaughter of a person to signal to the audience that the literary world the reader has entered is suffering from a deep social crisis that has caused a perverse inversion of normative systems of human society, which brings into focus the norms and standards of human culture. (The Poetics of Human Sacrifice in Virgil’s Aeneid by Bill Gladhill)

Is that very different now in the US when 800,000 have died here while other highly vaccinated countries are opening up with far lower death rates? Statistically, looking at 84 countries, the major difference between highly compliant counties with low death rates and non-compliant ones with high death rates like us is the degree of trust we have in our country, the degree to which we have built in structural economic inequality and how much trust in each other! (Click here for article in Science Direct.)

It is indisputable that our current rate of human sacrifice to Covid is far higher in alt right communities that voted for Donald Trump. (Click here for article from NPR.)

So we know: 1) The communities with more Covid suffer more income disparity at the hands of their neighbors and political leaders. 2) They are being bombarded with bad information about their own society so they do not recognize, in our case, a) the science of vaccines, b) the benefits increasing government investment in opportunity, and c) trust in traditional normative news sources which impartially report on the real multifaceted world we live in.

Alternately stated we can not move forward when people listen to alt right news sources promoting people so craven that they extoll extreme alt right positions including Covid noncompliance and death. (Couched in lies of course to hide the power grab.)

The moral is to listen to traditional news and evidence-based life saving measures and also reject trading on fear of the person sitting to the right or left of you; to calm down and use common sense; to read the election documents ourselves or trust the Courts that have; to take top experts and numbers seriously; to understand it’s always been true that doing something that others find works well is better than continued failure.

As the Romans understood, when we stand by and do not fight human sacrifice  we are in a period of perverse inversion.

I repeat, 800,000 US deaths later, it’s time to stand straight and true. President Bush is contributing to Republicans who voted for impeachment, perhaps you should too.

Conrad F. Cropsey

Albion