All of these points come from Ed Yong’s recent piece at The Atlantic: “How the Pandemic Defeated America.”
- We under-fund public health.
- Our health-care system is weak.
- Too much of what we do spend on healthcare is wasted.
- We have not dealt sufficiently with systemic racism.
- Our attempts to shred our nation’s social safety net has failed us
- Social media is destroying us.
- We are a nation of anti-intellectuals who do not believe in expertise.
- The media only enhances our anti-intellectualism, rejection of expertise, and belief in conspiracy theories.
- Individualism has its limits.
- Our country lacks leadership, especially in the White House.
- Our president lies to us.
- Politics is more important than truth.
- We don’t believe in climate change.
- We don’t care about the natural habitats of animals.
- We are xenophobes.
- We fail to heed warnings.
- Our prisons are overcrowded.
- Our nursing homes are woefully understaffed.
- We view health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.
- 20th century advances in medicine have made us complacent in the 21st century.
- We treat the elderly as “acceptable losses.”
- We treat people with intellectual disabilities and dementia as second-class citizens.
- There are Americans who ignore the government and follow science.
- Our failure to cultivate strong international alliance has failed us.
Read the Yong’s piece here.
