The beginning of the effort to resuscitate Arkansas' decimated economy coincided with the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. I wonder if I'm the only one who drew my breath in disbelief as world leaders compared the battle against the coronavirus to fighting the most colossal war in Europe's history.
The leaders never quite told us how giving orders that drove restaurants and shops into the ground for no obviously good reason is comparable in bravery to getting shot out of the sky while bombing Nazi cities. They never told us how saying that casual, pandemic-world sex between strangers is OK while the custom of hand-shaking should be abolished forever--a Fauci gem--is akin to rescuing Jews from mass murder.
And, for the record, the medics who risked their own lives to save others, including enemies, at Anzio, Normandy and the Ardennes never would have accepted the casual designation of "hero." There are real heroes and manufactured ones. The real ones tend to reject the title.
But there is one sense in which a WWII analogy does fit. After the war, Britain was exhausted, not only militarily and economically, but psychologically. There are people living today who were children when Britain's Navy ruled the seas and the British flag flew over about 20 percent of the earth. Whatever else it takes for a small country to have so vast an empire, it requires some mental grit. And the British had grit reserves to draw on through the war. But after the Victory in Europe celebrations ended in May 1945, Britons could see that they and their culture were exhausted. In short order, Britain became a second-rate and then a third-rate power.
As I watch Congress pile more and more debt onto the shoulders of our young and then notice that few seem to care; as I listen to a president who obviously knows so little; as I note that our governor rightly argued that a one-size-for-all approach doesn't work in the country, but then maintains that all of Arkansas must take the same path as Little Rock; as I consider the apparently thorough absence in my city of Siloam Springs of municipal leaders willing to speak for and defend local realities; as I have witnessed business leaders bend the knee and go along with shutdown policies they knew were destructive; as I saw pastors acquiesce, without a whimper of dissent, to government mandates to shutter their churches for two months (something never done before in a supposedly free society); as I recognized that the virus has given power-worshippers a welcomed opportunity like no other; and as I saw Arkansans of age giving their children the lifelong memory of adults cowering in fear from a virus that isn't, and never was, a threat to the large majority of people--when I took all this in, I realized that our society had reached some tragic milestone.
We are unworthy of the young men who held their ground at Bastogne, of those who crossed the Rhine, of the liberators of Rome and Paris.
My heart breaks as I contemplate this unforced economic catastrophe we brought on ourselves in a fit of panic, compounded by a refusal to recognize that the lockdown mandates of late March were unwise and are now devastating.
When this pitiful episode of social self-sabotage burns out, we will face tsunamis of newly homeless, newly drug-addicted and newly suicidal--most of them unemployed witnesses to the fact that the "jobs versus life" dichotomy was always false. Some of Arkansas' private colleges will not survive. Thousands of high school juniors and seniors will have disappeared from the rolls. The collective fury will be great, but much of the leader class will have been discredited.
I wish I could believe we had the collective psychological strength to face what's to come. I try to talk myself into believing it. But the economic devastation we can see in our cities and towns is a material reflection of something within.
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Preston Jones taught full-time at John Brown University in Siloam Springs from 2003 to May 2020.
Editorial on 05/25/2020