We Are All Flak Catchers

Although David Brooks describes his latest New York Times column as analyzing the five crises the United States is in that is actually an exaggeration. The crises are:

• “we are losing the fight against Covid-19”
• “white Americans, are undergoing a rapid education on the burdens African-Americans carry every day”
• “we’re in the middle of a political realignment”
• “a quasi-religion is seeking control of America’s cultural institutions”
• “we could be on the verge of a prolonged economic depression”

but he devotes most of his column to the fourth. Let’s consider the other four briefly.

Are we actually “losing the fight against Covid-19”? I know that the number of cases in California, Texas, and Florida as well as other Southern and Southwestern states is increasing. Wasn’t that the objective of the lockdowns? I. e. to time-shift the incidence of the cases of COVID-19 until local health care systems were better prepared to handle them? The mortality due to COVID-19 in the named states remains a small fraction of that in New York, New Jersey, and other Northeastern states greatly affected by the disease. So long as that stays the case isn’t the increase in incidence a mark of success rather than failure?

There are bound to be some facilities that will have more cases than they can handle but I would think that is different from a health care system failure. Please correct me on this.

On the second issue maybe I’m inured to this. I spent my first ten years in a neighborhood that was becoming black, I was reared in part by black women, I had black classmates in primary school and high school, worked with a black crew in which I was the only white (I wasn’t the boss but the lowliest of the low), I had black friends and acquaintances in college, black neighbors now. None of “the burdens African-Americans carry every day” is news to me. My own view is that in the 1970s there was a window of opportunity during which we might have healed the wounds created by slavery and Jim Crow but instead we chose to import tens of millions of workers from Mexico and Central America while expanding trade with Japan, South Korea, and China. Now our original sin is intractable. The Hispanic “persons of color” will become white with astonishing swiftness while blacks will remain in the same situation they have been for decades with less power and a weaker argument than ever before.

On the third I think I would say

1. We’re not in the middle. We are nearing the end. The realignment happened while Mr. Brooks was looking the other way.
2. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

while on the fifth I have written at length. I think we have a window of opportunity during which we might correct the mistakes we have been making over the period of the last half century. It’s a shame that there are no political leaders with the vision to seize that opportunity but are much more interested in micromanaging the behavior of their fellow citizens while grabbing as much wealth and power for themselves as they can.

The fourth issue is what has been referred to by some as “social justice warriors”. Contrary to Mr. Brooks, I think they are simple rent-seekers and were described by Tom Wolfe 50 years ago in his essay Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers. Just say “no”.