I think it's pretty clear that the Covid pandemic has not been our finest hour. If you are an elderly person or someone at higher risk due to a health condition, you've learned that some of your fellow citizens don't give a single damn about your well being. If you're a medical professional, you've learned that explaining fairly simple concepts requires a patience that would've driven Job into a murderous rage. The pandemic has exposed a serious problem with our societies: A large segment of the population prefers ignorance and delusions to knowledge and reality, and we are at their mercy.
In Canada, we are having a third wave of Covid. The main reason for this is simply that compliance with lockdown measures has been too low from the beginning. For a significant segment of the population, any measure by the government is viewed as an illegitimate attempt to control them by "elites" who "look down on us." This narrative has been exploited by the reactionary right for a long time, but it exploded during the pandemic, mainly because there was a complete failure of leadership by certain politicians and media figures. You can guess who is Exhibit A.
After he won in 2016, many people predicted that Trump was not at all equipped to deal with a crisis, the main reason being that his conception of everything is entirely framed by how it impacts him personally. This was sadly prescient. He immediately politicized an emergency, which is the exact opposite of what you should do. A crisis demands calls for unity and a plea for shared sacrifice. Even if those words often ring hollow to some cynical ears, they at least do no actual harm. But Trump did actual harm. He manically flailed from denial to bragging how well he was handling the crisis to back to denying that it actually was a crisis at all. He mocked those who wore masks, blamed everyone and everything he could think of ("if we tested less we'd have fewer cases") and pushed dangerous nonsense about potential cures.
It wasn't just Trump. The insanity spread all over the world as sleazy opportunists crawled out of their holes to take advantage of the pandemic. This was a gold mine for useless social media influencers and greedy TV blowhards and before you knew it, a public health emergency was just another circus act in the endless culture war between left and right. Wearing or not wearing a mask was a political statement; defying government lockdowns was celebrated as something akin to the French Resistance. Without this tidal wave of lies and word vomit, it's likely that a lot more people would have listened to our medical experts and hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive.
This ignorance was aggressive and militant. How else to explain the devotion given to a breathtakingly stupid president, who wondered if injecting bleach into the body would kill the virus (hey, it works on countertops!), while Dr. Fauci, who has spent half a century studying infectious diseases, received abuse and innumerable death threats for having the temerity to offer actual solutions? When reality didn't live up to their delusions, some ran to conspiracy fantasies (they are not theories) like Qanon to explain it all away and demanded that social media platforms allow them to spew this garbage in the name of free speech. (Sorry, but neither the First Amendment nor the Charter of Rights states that you are entitled to an audience.)
It isn't just Covid. Progress on many issues - climate change, gun control in the US, tax policy - is road blocked by falsehoods, magical thinking and sheer ignorance that unethical politicians can take advantage of. Take illegal immigration in the US. The most important component to any solution has to include imposing harsh and costly penalties on companies caught employing undocumented workers. Without access to jobs, the flow across the border slows dramatically. Anyone who seriously studies the issue comes to this conclusion, mainly because it is obvious. Yet Trump never brought this up (most likely because as of 2019 his resorts were still employing undocumented workers) even though he made illegal immigration the focal point of his 2016 campaign. The fact that the GOP ignores this solution should tell you that they are not really interested in solving the problem, but only in using it to inflame their supporters. The logic at work here is simple enough that an eight year-old can understand it. But not, apparently, tens of millions of US voters.
Aren't the experts sometimes wrong? Didn't they initially say wearing masks wouldn't help? Under this simple-minded reasoning, the fact that our medical people didn't get it 100 percent right from the beginning is apparently justification to throw out everything they say. No, experts are not infallible and they often disagree among themselves. But we need to bring knowledge and data into our debates and not allow people to make up their own 'alternative facts.' We have let the ignorant popularize myths until they become accepted as true. The media gives oxygen to these myths in the name of fairness, and then we wonder why certain problems persist and seem unsolvable. This is exactly what has happened with climate change. The damage this causes is incalculable. The pandemic showed that it gets people killed, and if we allow it to continue to block sensible actions on climate change, the toll will be exponentially higher.
Being able to express your opinion in a free society comes with requirements - an open mind, humility about what you know and don't know, and a desire to listen and learn. We want debate and disagreement, because that's how we get to the truth. What we have now isn't so much debate as a segment of the populace childishly stomping its feet and plugging its collective ears. As we see with the pandemic, this doesn't solve problems, it just makes them worse. It won't ever be easy or perfect, but relying on knowledge is vastly superior to your feelings and fantasies, every single time.
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