Curt Smith: The pandemic is forcing us to stop tolerating stupid

When we emerge from this lockdown called COVID-19, the world will be different.

Some changes will be huge, even transformational. Others will be less dramatic. But it is helpful to recognize that not all change will be bad.

We mourn the deaths of hundreds, grieve the economic calamity, lament lost social interactions and anguish over added anxiety about our well-being.

But there are plausible positive outcomes, beginning by recognizing that, in so many ways, we are finally just stopping stupid.

Consider Washington as it breaks political and policy taboos. One shattered taboo is tort reform, or changes in liability laws. Congress made industrial N95 respirator masks available for health care workers by removing legal risks for manufacturers. Other liabilities are being waived, with the tsunami of this crisis washing away the tired, self-serving objections of the trial lawyer lobby.

Another shattered taboo is the incremental nature of medical research, a system rigidly enforced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. We cannot afford to be incremental now; we need transformational breakthroughs. The FDA, accordingly, is allowing risk-taking on a scale never before contemplated. We will be healthier sooner and in far more ways because of such concentration of effort.

Moreover, increased healthy hygiene is already reducing flu deaths and other infections.

Thinking internationally, many worry America’s stature is suffering. But consider the harm China has done to its standing. Perhaps we won the second Cold War—waged against the Chinese Communist Party—without a shot being fired, although we will all be taking vaccine shots for years to come to finish the fight.

Similarly, our European Union allies, with whom we compete economically, have suffered more than America. But notice there is no EU response. It is a nation-by-nation reaction. The trend started by the financial crisis that left behind zombie EU banks, then accelerated by Brexit, could be completed by COVID-19. We could witness the EU’s unraveling and the reemergence of independent nations across the continent.

China’s diminution and the EU’s fracture enhance America’s international standing relative to our two biggest economic rivals.

That economic engine, America’s service economy—from highly trained and credentialed health care workers to truck drivers to grocery store cashiers—is finally getting its due. We are indeed interdependent, and there is dignity in all work.

Additionally, we might well turn inward and deepen our spiritual commitments, especially those suddenly and unexpectedly deprived of joining with fellow congregants for worship. We will cherish more what was perhaps all too familiar. This could foster spiritual revival, revival brought on by a virus.

Finally, maybe millennials and Generation Z will finally get a break. Shaped by the 9/11 attacks, and frozen early in their careers by the financial crisis, their reliance on technology to foster existing and forge new relationships online might give younger workers an economic edge in our social-distanced future. Sociologists feared they eschewed true human connection over impersonal technology, but this might become an advantage as commercial interactions increasingly move online.

Let’s hope this crisis boosts younger Hoosiers, with both greater opportunity and generational cohesion, because they have sacrificed much to reduce risk in this pandemic. Boomers and the Greatest Generation owe them a debt. The older generations will need to financially sacrifice to restore our economic house. This, too, could be good.

So, if this analysis is on target, we’ll do more than stop stupid. We will stop tolerating stupid.•

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