What’s Right?
East Burnside, Thursday, April 2 at 4:26 pm.
An uncertain consideration of uncertain times.
This past Friday night, we decided to take a break from our own cooking and ordered take-out sushi. Our unoriginal idea was shared by enough people that we ended up waiting an hour with a throng as harried workers tried to keep up with orders. The scene featured a normal distribution of human behavior. One guy decided to organize things by arranging people at six-feet intervals on the sidewalk in the order they expected to get their food. Most complied, but some just drifted away. One woman arriving a half hour into our wait, crowded up right next to the door. She wouldn’t allow the sushi guy six feet of space to place the sacks of food out for pickup. It seemed like she thought this would somehow hurry her order. She refused to move. After awhile, the orderly queue disintegrated. The sushi worker kept putting out the food.
These are apt metaphors for what’s happening in this time of coronavirus. Some systems are streamlined and functioning, some are crippled and dangerous. But mostly, no one knows for sure what to do. A third of a million Americans have tested positive for COVID-19, ten thousand are known dead, and we’re all lunging from one data point to the next, trying to understand what actions have the least negative downstream consequences.
Witnessing these chaotic spectacles, I’m left wondering: what’s the right thing to do here? The American social safety net is near nonexistent. Most people can’t afford to shelter in place for three months while bills pile up. The rent is too damn high. Car payments, student loan and credit card debt continue to compound the holes people are in. The government has passed the most generous bill in history, and yet it will barely help many people scrape by, and may not be available for weeks.
We’ve built a system to protect those who can afford it stay away from work. Those who can’t—they keep working. If that means placing sacks of extremely inessential sushi next to a potentially contaminated woman who won’t get the hell out of the way, well, that’s what someone’s getting paid twelve bucks an hour to do.
We’re trying to decide if it’s better to patronize a business because someone needs a job even though we know many will get sick, or staying home and letting the businesses shutter and forcing the workers fend for their financial lives. It’s a terrible choice, and yet this is the uncertainty of the times. How safe is it to go for a walk, a bike ride? How effective is that t-shirt mask? How should elections be conducted?* What’s the best way to help?
The president of the United States is encouraging people to take a random drug. Hey, it might help! (He abjures masks.) An economic advisor and the lead infectious disease experts are publicly feuding over studies of this drug. That may seem like a gimme, but there are other less obvious questions. What should people do at Easter? At funerals? In prisons? Our working knowledge of these things changes almost daily. On Friday, authorities were thinking homemade masks weren’t an effective strategy; by Saturday they had changed their minds.
What should we be paying people forced to work at grocery stores and gas stations and farms, without whom everything collapses? These suddenly-essential people haven’t been treated that way, ever. And mostly they’re still not.
The mask question is a relevant one, because there are two ways to think about it. From the narrow perspective of self-interest, it’s probably not worth it—unless you have material fine enough to filter out viral molecules, they’re not hugely effective. They do stop a fair amount of spray from leaving the mouth and blanketing the outer environment. Preventing even a portion of the virus from being sprayed around the environment is a huge epidemiological boon. If we think of disease spread, getting people to wear masks is a good move, even if it won’t really help the wearers. (This is, obviously, not a compelling reason for many people. So should the authorities lie and make them seem more personally effective if they’ll save lives? More uncertainty.)
So back to the question: what’s right? If I want to help and protect people, should I be ordering beer and getting takeout, or staying home? This is a rhetorical question—there’s no single answer that is right for every person out there. That’s what makes it such an excruciating question. What we want is for no one to suffer now, but that choice just isn’t on the table. When Sally and I headed out to pick up our sushi, I thought I knew the answer. When I arrived and saw how risky it was for the server, I suddenly felt monstrous. This morning nothing is clearer—except the numbers, which continue to rise.
Be well out there—
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*Don’t ask Wisconsin.