The mask is supposed to be over the mouth and nose, not the eyes

While President Trump's agitation on behalf of opening up the economy sooner and more completely than the experts think is wise has politicized the issue and weakened the consensus that the process should be gradual, deliberate, and cautious, he has yet to convince most of us.

A new AP-NORC poll shows that while support for "stay at home" orders have slipped in the last month from 80% to 60% and the number of people supporting a ban on gatherings of ten or more people has declined from 83% to 69% since April, a strong majority of Americans are still more afraid of the unchecked spread of the SARS CoV-2 virus than of the economic consequences of aggressive efforts to contain it.

The shrinking of the majority seems to largely, but not exclusively, be a matter of partisan politics. Republican support for stay-at-home orders has shrunk in the last month from 70% to only 45% as the President's attitude has solidified as the "party line," and only about a third of Republicans now say that they are very or extremely concerned about the consequences of re-opening prematurely, as opposed to 78% of Democrats. But last month, Democratic support was at 90%.

Groupthink is obviously playing a major role here. It seems perverse, to say the least, that our response to containing a pandemic should have become a partisan political issue, but the attitude of President Trump- who until about a month ago denied that COVID was going to be a serious problem and even now is encouraging the re-opening of society at a rate faster than that outlined even by the guidelines of his own task force- has politicized an issue which ought to be bi-partisan if anything is ever going to be bi-partisan.

The rationale for being imprudent is hard to follow unless it flows from a simple refusal to recognize that the experts know what they're talking about.  Dr. Anthony Fauci warned quite eloquently last week about the dangers of disregarding the guidelines issued by the White House task force. "Obviously, you can get away with that, but you're making a serious risk," he cautioned.

But his warning- predictably- fell on deaf presidential and gubernatorial ears, and understandably quarantine-weary Americans, taking comfort in the declining rates of deaths and new infections, are increasingly inclined to follow the classic Trumpian practice of believing, not what the evidence says, but what they want to believe.

A majority of states have now begun the process of re-opening. With the second wave of COVID expected in the fall and winter- the second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic saw the majority of the deaths caused by another virus spread by respiratory means- one wonders what the public response will be. Will there be resistance to doing nearly all of us saw the need to do for the first wave? And if so, what will the cost be in human lives?

One ominous sign: while I live in a state that has been hit harder by the virus than most of the farm belt outside Illinois, I've noticed that the number of people wearing masks in public has shrunk to a very, very small minority.

As the infection rate and the death rate decrease, opening things up is only reasonable- provided that common sense precautions remain in effect. Until we're finally out of the woods- and that may take years- it's only reasonable that there should be an ebbing and flowing of restrictions depending on the current situation. To stay on permanent and total lockdown until COVID is gone would be as unreasonable and perverse as the President's recklessness. Perhaps even more so.

Nobody is advocating that, and it's not going to happen. But the fight against COVID and SARS CoV-2 is going to be a long, hard one as it is. It's not helped by government leaders encouraging the perversity of the ideologically-crazed minority who somehow think that common sense and settled constitutional law to the contrary, prudent mandatory public health measures compelling individuals not to endanger the lives and safety of others is somehow unconstitutional or any kind of "tyranny." Nor is anybody helped by risking unnecessary suffering and death to make a political point or to gain political benefit.

It may be eroding, but the support of the American people for a reasonable course of action remains strong. The economy should open up as soon and to the greatest degree that is safely possible. But no sooner, and no further.

It seems amazing that this should be a matter of partisan political controversy, and while President Trump is unquestionably part of the reason it would be a mistake to blame only him. If we've reached a point where we can't agree to act on the best available information for the benefit of the American people as a whole, it's the fault of both sides in perpetuating our descent into the ditch of extremism and rabid partisanship that has made "compromise" a dirty word and ideological orthodoxy something more valued in both parties than pragmatism and effectiveness. My instincts tell me that no matter what happens in November, we will remain divided and childishly, petulantly unwilling to listen to each other for the foreseeable future, almost certainly well beyond the crisis we're in now due to the pandemic.

How long we can live that way as a free people is another question.  Wearing a mask over our mouths and noses in public is an act of simple decency. COVID is often asymptomatic, and none of us knows for sure that he or she isn't shedding virus every time we leave our homes. It would certainly be fair to say that wearing a mask should be a matter of individual choice if it were a matter of protecting ourselves. But it's not.

It's about protecting others. It's about not simply courtesy, but common decency.  And the same is true of our attitude toward the tightrope between prudence and recklessness we are going to be walking for a very long time in our periods of sheltering-in-place and various degrees of social distancing which are unfortunately going to be alternating until an effective vaccine can not only be developed but distributed effectively.

It can't be simply about one's personal situation even if we're talking about a lack of income. It certainly can't be about how much I miss baseball or hanging out with my friends at the local bar or getting a regular haircut. It's also about the other guy.

Spock was wrong. The needs of the many do not outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. To think otherwise is to forget that "the many" is simply a conglomeration of a great many "ones." Respecting individual rights is what makes us not only a free society but a decent one. The greatest crimes of history have for the most part been perpetrated in the name of glorious causes whose only real goal was finally the greatest good for the greatest number. Idealists who lose track of the individual for the sake of the common good are very dangerous people,

But so are those who are so obsessed with individual rights that they fail to recognize that to disregard the rights of the many is to disregard the rights of a great many "ones." It's only our mutual commitment to the common good that makes society even possible. Radical libertarianism can be as impractical and destructive as authoritarianism if it crosses the line into anarchy.

And it's hard to see the stampede to open things up now, regardless of the consequences, as anything other than a form of anarchy, of radical selfishness that finally is destructive of the rights even of the individual. This runs directly contrary to the spirit of the age, but we desperately need to rediscover the importance of balancing the rights of the one and the rights of the multiple "ones" who make up the "many."

Stalin once said, "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." And it can be nothing more than a statistic until and unless we can see, not a million deaths, but the deaths of a million individuals.

Maybe the reason why fewer and fewer of us are wearing literal masks over our noses and mouths is that we're wearing metaphorical masks over our eyes. We're a people that values individual rights and individual freedom. But we're also a decent and generous people, at our best, that cares about the other guy, too.

We can't let this pandemic chose between being either one or the other. That would be the greatest tragedy of all.