As the coronavirus continues to rage across this nation and every corner of Oklahoma, a great number of people of every shape, color, height, social and political status continue to make excuses and justifications for why this country and its citizens now find themselves in such grave peril.
Cast aside the political sparring, the justifications, the excuses, and the complaints.
The reason America is now in this shape can best be summed up by a single line in a poster distributed nationwide for decades using the famous Pogo comic strip characters.
The line?
“Yup. We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The poster, distributed by a group promoting Earth Day, lamented the destruction of Earth’s beauty. The poster featured Pogo characters, one of whom, summed that situation up by saying “Yup. We have met the enemy and he is us!”
Fast forward to today and the same lament now could be said about Americans and our society as the deadliest sickness since the Spanish Flu devastated the world in 1918 envelops our nation.
Just the other day, I was sporting rubber gloves, a homemade mask, and stand- ing in one of Walmart’s infamously long check-out lines (hire people, not machines!) with a ton of groceries meant to help keep the wife and I from having to get out of the house for a couple of months or longer.
I wouldn’t have even been out at all, but we were out of nearly everything and in these times I’m the designated errand runner for all things because I don’t want my wife of 47 years to put herself in any sort of peril.
As the cashier and I were exchanging comments about our current state of affairs – through our masks – a middle-aged white guy waiting in line behind me decided to join our conservation.
“This virus thing is a joke. It’s just the Democrats trying to get Trump when they couldn’t impeach him!”
The man wore no gloves, no mask, or no face shield. Clearly, he was a coronavirus disbeliever.
The cashier and I looked at each other and I offered a retort loud enough so the guy standing at the other end of the conveyor belt could hear me:
“Yeah, I’m spending $600 dollars here today because of...”
Well, I’m not going to write everything I said because it wasn’t polite or diplomatic in any sense. Let’s just say I scoffed loudly at his words.
Even behind the protection of her mask I could tell the cashier was about to burst out loud laughing at my comment.
When I made it to my car, I sat there for a moment before removing my protective gear, thinking about what could make that person believe such tripe.
Then I remembered the famous line that is regularly mistaken to have originated in the Pogo comic strip from decades ago:
“We have met the enemy and HE IS US.”
Indeed, we are.
Sociologist Susan Jacoby in her 2004 best-selling book “The Age Of American Unreason” labeled the phenomenon displayed by the man behind me as “willful ignorance.”
In her tome, Jacoby, a nationally respected sociologist and author laden with facts, argued that “America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism.”
“As opposed to the recognizable cyclical strains of the past,” she argued, the new strain, “is aggressively promoted by everyone, from politicians to media executives ... and it is passively accepted by a public in thrall to the serpent promising effortless enjoyment from the fruit of the tree of infotainment.”
In simpler terms, we don’t have time to learn the facts and we often don’t care to do so. We just want to be, and act, stupid.
Jacoby’s lament reveals this country’s truth more today than it did nearly two decades ago. Of course, millions of Americans aren’t alike, and our country doesn’t have a monopoly on that kind of ignorance. Willful ignorance abounds all over the globe. But we have too much of that type of ignorance dancing around our country these days.
We do have the First Amendment, of course, which says we can say almost anything and not be legally punished for it. That law is the best law ever enacted in any country on the globe ever.
However, that type of willful ignorance definitely should not be impacting the policies of our nation, states, cities, and towns in dangerous times such as these. Sadly, however, at first, it was.
The last time I checked, COVID-19 wasn’t just killing Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Green Party believers, racists, homophobes, socialists or right-wing fascists.
It’s killing people from all walks of life and from every country in the world.
That is THE reality. Our reality.
Now, only willfully ignorant idiots are the only ones deriding that truth and those facts.