Two dismal, mutually reinforcing photographs have been in the news recently. In one, a forlorn line of masked men and women stand waiting in the snow to be tested for COVID by a healthcare worker hazmat-suited as though for protection against a flesh-eating scourge such as Ebola, not for an ailment now akin to the common cold. In the other, a miles-long line of cars and trucks congeals on the I-95 in Virginia for 24 hours in a snowstorm.
Both are metaphors for the gloomy, apathetic, drained, fearful, and frustrated state of America as we begin 2022. In each image, people are stranded by afflictions that fell from the air, in aerosol droplets in one case and in frozen droplets in the other. In each case also, the government response has been lamentable — omicronic in one instance and merely incompetent in the other.
But the bone-headedness of officialdom and the stand-and-wait defeatism of ordinary people are part of a deeper affliction than either winter or the coronavirus. Both evince a lack of confidence. Clear judgment, individual energy, and self-reliance are melting like snowdrifts in Virginia. They look as though they’ll last, but they are hollowing out, and soon, we’ll wake up and realize they aren’t there anymore.
Harold Nicolson, the great English diarist of the 1930s and 1940s, noted that after the Second World War, the British seemed to believe they need not work or make an effort anymore. Having endured the rigors and horrors of a great conflict, and having emerged from it a lessened power, they lost their vigor and their desire to act in their own interest. They wanted the government to look after them.
Something like that is afflicting America now, two years into the pandemic. Once-sensible people are being lured to a national smash-up by a socialist lullaby that tells them their government will take care of them while they sleep.
Four and a half million people quit their jobs in November. There are 12 million vacancies. The Wall Street Journal reports that employers are offering six-week paid sabbaticals in the expensive hope that it will lift staff out of deep exhaustion. Millions of people chose not to work last summer and instead to live on government handouts. Millions more now cheer as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and President Joe Biden ratchet up moral hazard by deferring student loan repayments, reducing the incentive to work.
But we cannot simply keep printing dollars that we do not earn, cannot borrow endlessly to buy goods and services we are unable to afford. It ends in tears, not metaphorically but literally. The problem is not merely the material one that credit will dry up and we will, in the famous phrase, “run out of other people’s money.” It is a moral one. The process of making ourselves dependent on others bankrupts us not simply of money but also of spirit.
We have to stop deceiving ourselves that our success and thriving can be arranged by someone else. This was once, without question, a can-do nation. It still is a can-do nation, but it has started to question itself. It needs to answer that question in the affirmative, and answer it soon.
