The idea that you have a moral obligation to change your behavior so as not to harm others sounds crazy to many Americans, even outside this particular context.

— Sturgeon’s Law (@Sturgeons_Law) March 12, 2020

Yeah, my partner remarked that she heard someone use the phrase “civic duty” and that even to her ears, it sounded antiquated. It does to mine too, alas. Such talk is considered among the neoliberal technocrats of the left and the right as so, just, déclassé and passé and something a prole would say.

We are so, so fucked as a society, as a polity. As a people.

Those “worry about the flu, not Covid-19, I’m a huge dumbass” articles are looking remarkably fucking stupid now, aren’t they?

Shows you how Slate-pitch contrarian Yglesias intellectual onanism only gets you so far, and when the real world hits it’s not very goddamn far at all.

This is America, fuckos. We know how to deal with this Covid-19 thing:

Growing up in the 1990s did not prepare me psychologically to deal with major historical events or crises. The biggest news of the decade was the OJ trial and the Clinton impeachment 🙄.

— Angie Schmitt 🚶‍♀️🚴‍♀️ 🚌 (@schmangee) March 12, 2020

Growing up during the 1980s with the constant menace of nuclear war hanging over everyone all the time, I’m just fine. Walk in the park. Not to minimize what’s occurring, but compared to nuclear annihilation that was the undercurrent of everything Covid-19 is just a blip that will soon enough pass for most people.

This thread by Zeynep Tufekci is a good wrap-up of what occurs when a pandemic meets predatory neoliberal capitalism, unrestrained libertarian fantasias, individualist delusions and sheer incompetence.

Covid-19 is the hammerblow that’s striking now, but its impetus and its power were augured long before by our inaction in protecting our own people: “impossible” as the wealthiest nation in the world to have health care for all, with mega-SUVs unleashed in the streets to run down all who stand in their way, and our plutocrats funding wars while allowing millions of homeowners to be foreclosed on and tossed onto the pavement with all their belongings. And of course, the big one: completely ignoring climate change and even “liberals” casting aspersions on those who said we should prioritize it.

These are all symptoms of the same malady, the same societal malfunction, the same civilizational putrescence that is now manifesting in all-too-literal sense with Covid-19. This is the now, and it’s also the future. That future world will look more like now as climate change worsens, as neoliberalism spasms and expires, as all our ideologies crumble and disperse in the wind leaving nothing but disorder and despair over the fact that we could’ve done something and did not.

We have met the enemy and it is a centrist chanting, “Everything is impossible.”