Shortly after the onset of the Trump Administration, I found myself on a Facebook thread reading a question posed by an apparent Trump supporter in response to some liberal overemoting on a topic lost to memory that asked, in essence, "How has Trump becoming president affected YOU negatively?," and then went on to say that, macro issues aside, is it really so bad having Trump as president if YOUR life hasn't changed for the worse? Seeing the concept of evaluating an issue or action solely on its personal impacts, I thought, was the perfect description of the 21st century Republican. You now, Dick Cheney caring about Gay Rights because one of his daughters came out or rich Republicans who care not a whit about the environment except in their own backyard, etc.
My mind involuntarily harkened back to these thoughts when I first read the story of Matt Colvin, a Tennessee man who, the day after the news broke of the first American death from COVID-19, decided with his brother to capitalize on the forthcoming tragic pandemic and anticipated panic by buying approximately 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer in the surrounding Kentucky and Tennessee areas with intentions of selling their wares on Amazon for highly inflated prices. The price gougers were stopped by Jeff Bezos' evil monolith after 300 bottles were already sold at an obscene profit. The subsequent national outcry over this and stories of others in Pennsylvania and Canada doing the same wicked (to be blunt) thing shamed Mr. Colvin into donating the remaining approximately 17,700 bottles for the public good.
All's well that ends well, one might incorrectly say, but where was the similar national public outcry when news stories broke out publicizing the skyrocketing, price gouging costs of insulin brands such as Levemir, Novolog, Lantus, and Humalog? I mean, after all, while one can debate the effectiveness of hand sanitizer alone as a weapon against COVID-19, there is a direct causal relationship between insulin and life for diabetics. And then I recalled, aha!, the hand sanitizer story sparked outrage because the entire nation as a whole were fruitlessly searching for bottles of it. They could relate to this shortage- it affected THEM. Whereas, the need for insulin does not affect everyone, even indirectly.
What was equally troubling was the number of social media posts that emphasized that COVID-19 was, in general, nothing to fear because most of us are relatively healthy enough to ultimately combat it. More than one post emphasized the elderly and/or those with heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung disease, or issues with the immune system as the people who really needed to worry about COVID-19. Very rarely did these posts not stop there to DEMAND (my emphasis) that all of us need to take precautions to not contract COVID-19, not just for self-preservation, but to ensure that we do not pass it on to those more vulnerable. Most just left it at the observation that YOU are most likely not vulnerable, a sort of perverse combination of forces of Darwinism and Bentham utilitarianism at play. The pre-crisis John Stuart Mill would be proud (I can't knock Mill for Wordsworth's poetry being the catalyst for Mill overcoming his crisis- the Beach Boys' Endless Summer had the same impact on me during a personal crisis many moons ago).
Oh, back to the thesis statement-less, first paragraph: were the toilet paper hoarding, hand sanitizing price gouging, and strictly self-preservation COVID-19 perspectives examples of a solely a Republican mindset? No, snatches from all ends of the political spectrum are exhibiting this behavior. With a broad brush is this, then, an American mindset? This writer doesn't know and cannot quite make out what the ghost of John F. Kennedy is trying to say, but it sounds like, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for you."
