A House Divided – Again – By Vaccination Rates

 

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."  Abraham Lincoln June 16, 1858

“The common and continual mischief's of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion.”

George Washington, Washington's farewell address: delivered to Congress on September 19, 1796 

History repeats, but not always as a farce, as Marx had it. There seem to be secular themes in the US and other countries that come back in rather dramatic ways.

160+ years ago, Abraham Lincoln warned for the first time that “a house divided cannot stand.” That was the last, desperate warning before the Civil War that still reverberates in the North-South cultural divide.

Back from a road trip across seven states -Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida- I noticed the differences between the world of the big cities and small-town America. I found most of those differences enriching and valuable. But also noticed how easily they could be exploited by populist politicians to sow divisions for political gain. The cemeteries and battle sites I found along the 1,300 miles of my trip reminded me that this happened before.

This time history repeats in dramatic form. Almost one million Americans died during the 1861-1864 Civil War, and 608,000 have died already during the 2020-2021 COVID 19 pandemic that is still in course. The final count might be very close, primarily because of the “house divided” factor.

The current house is divided by politics once again. This would not be news but for a dramatic, life-threatening factor: vaccination rates.

Although Trump could take credit for speeding the development of new vaccines,  it must also take responsibility for encouraging vaccine avoidance in the states that voted for him. County by county, the vaccination map reproduces the 2020 election map. Unfortunately, the infection rates -90+percent among non-vaccinated- also reflect the partisan divide. And that is a lethal difference when the new Delta variant starts to spread in the United States.

I cannot avoid remembering George Washington’s warning against partisan factions. I already wrote about his farewell speech, prescient of the Civil War. Back then, populist politicians and politics turned the partisan division into a deadly war between Americans. Now, once again, toxic populist politics -fanned by the speed and reach of social media conspiracy theory networks- are exposing unnecessarily millions of Americans to a deadly virus.

Lincoln’s advice stands even more prescient than Washington’s. A house divided -half vaccinated and half not- cannot stand in the war against a virus that can mutate and reinfect almost endlessly unless checked by vaccination.

Hard as it is to believe in the 21^st century and in the country that developed the vaccines against the disease, the United States runs the risk of losing thousands of lives unnecessarily.

Blaming the Internet or Facebook for vaccine avoidance deflects responsibility from those who should be criminally accountable for spreading conspiracy theories, rumors, and false information. That buck stops right at the table of former President Mr. Donald J. Trump, who still could use his significant influence to encourage vaccination among his followers. He seems so far too busy disputing the 2020 elections and campaigning for a return in 2024.

The alternative is much less effective and painful: a combination of fear of dying and the negative self-selection of death will undoubtedly do the hatchet job.

Looking for a silver lining is very difficult. Perhaps if there is a lesson to be learned -as it happened after the Civil War- we can hope it will last for a couple of generations, which -as Ronald Reagan said of freedom- will be that far from extinction.