Answering the Kennedys’ Call
South Dakota’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally this August was notable for the estimated 450,000 attending during the COVID-19 pandemic. It happened in spite of the almost unanimous warnings given by public health officials that it could be the mother-of-all super-spreader events.
Is this the last cry from a culture of narcissism that has prevailed in America since at least the 1970s, a culture of ‘me first’ with the credo of personal freedom unhindered by a regard for the welfare of others?
“Within weeks of the gathering,” reported WashPost, “the Dakotas, along with Wyoming, Minnesota and Montana, were leading the nation in new coronavirus infections per capita. The surge was especially pronounced in North and South Dakota, where cases and hospitalization rates continued their juggernaut rise into October.”
There were no state and local health officials to identify and monitor attendees returning home, or to trace chains of transmission after people got sick. “Some, however, believe the nearly 500,000-person gathering played a role in the outbreak now consuming the Upper Midwest,” according to WashPost.
And a USA TODAY analysis showed COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of President Trump’s most recent political rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.
“Together, those counties saw 1,500 more new cases in the two weeks following Trump’s rallies than the two weeks before – 9,647 cases, up from 8,069.”
Why the almost suicidal determination of those bikers, and Trump die-hard supporters, to behave with such a blatant disregard for their own health, or that of others?
Were they making a desperate last stand against a pandemic that outnumbered them? Many of the attendees maintained it was an infringement of their personal freedom to not be able to participate in such public gatherings that obviously meant so much to them.
“I don’t think there was nothing that was going to stop me,” said one middle-aged biker who was infected with COVID-19 at the Sturgis rally, according to the WashPost.
In every other western country going through the same struggle to control the new coronavirus, super-spreader events wouldn’t be allowed or even considered in this day and age. Yet no authorities, or our Commander-in-Chief, mandated the banning of super-spreader events as a public health danger that could ultimately infect tens of thousands of Americans.
What will it take to end to such destructive behavior, based on a credo of personal freedom that has also fragmented our country into red and blue states? Are we seeing an end in President Donald Trump’s failing faux populism which has always been for the benefit of the financial elites, rather than discontented proletariat, and who has been diagnosed by multiple mental health professionals with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder?
This behavior is another description of a sociopathy —to use a clinical term—that has infected one political party, a party that is in effect destroying itself. The natural world has signaled that this behavior without a regard for the welfare of others, can no longer be tolerated. Mother Nature in the form of this COVID-19 pandemic is calling for an end to this culture of narcissism during the worst disease pandemic in 100 years.
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam with co-author Shaylyn Romney Garrett, in his latest best-seller, The Upswing, How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We can Do It Again, believes we are seeing the dawn of a new era with the youth of America, one that eclipses the culture of narcissism and advances Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive policies of more than a century ago that broke up big business monopolies and instituted more egalitarian public policies, ultimately leading to FDR’s New Deal.
“America’s challenges will be equally difficult to solve—and will therefore require just as much youthful courage, vigor, and imagination to overcome. And so, to a large extent, America’s fate lies in the hands of the post-Boomer generations. Today’s young people did not cause today’s problems. But like their predecessors 125 years ago, they must forgo the cynicism of drift and embrace the hope of mastery.”
Will it signal the dawning of a new, more forward looking era, a new, new deal? Let us hope so, beginning with the results of this presidential election.
Harlan Green © 2020
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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