Needs of Many

Needs of the Many

As of 10:00 AM (EDT) this 20^th day of April in the year of our Lord 2020, John Hopkins University has officially notched 40,683 human deaths attributed to the Novel Covid-19 virus since the first known death on February 29^th. Eleven out of every 100,000 Americans having died in 52 days – a number which certainly is in same league with scourges of my childhood.

I do not pretend to know the needs of the many.

I do not propose to know any answers, or if they exist.

I do know my own needs have not been particularly impaired by staying home. It is what I’ve been doing for some time. Uncomfortably, I seem to have become too comfortable with quarantine.

Based solely on observations of an old man in an easy chair who has absolutely no voice in the matter, this is what I observe concerning events happening beyond my personal stay-at-home need:

First, to quote Winston Churchill, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Or, as Al Jolson more simply put it in 1927 movie The Jazz Singer, “you ain’t heard nothing yet”.

     It is going to get worse,

     it will never be the “same”,

     ‘get used to it’.

Second, we are where we are – and are going where we are going – primarily because of a dearth of national leadership. In every human crises there has arisen a leader who takes command with coherence and credibility whom others therefore follow, even if only for the moment. Such a leader gives clear direction; delegates line authority; and, in victory or defeat, accepts responsibility. If such a leader does not arise, only mayhem prevails.

     No such national leader has arisen,

     or at least none has been allowed to arise.

Third, I observe a generation which has never had to sacrifice all for the good of the many. Yes, we owe a great deal to the few who sacrifice themselves when thrown unprepared into the fight; and to the many of good heart who have done what they could. But tragedy, if it passes our way at all, touches only the few it touches.

     My parent’s generation understood what it meant to sacrifice the one for the needs of the many: Although basically a pacifist, my father left his family and joined unknowable millions in fighting World War II. My brother bought War Bonds and made ‘bandages’ to help the War effort. My mother took in boarders and lived on ration stamps. Because that long-gone generation sacrificed the few, the many became “great”.

     We born after WWII have no such universally shared calamity which called forth national sacrifice. For us personal sacrifice has most often been for the benefit of the few, and largely transitory. And, solely in this observation, we have become largely a people unprepared to sacrifice the needs of the few, of the one, for the needs of the many.

God Save the United States of America