The US is getting truly nuts, sitting as it is on the very top of a perfect storm of vicious cycles.
There are some strong long-range influences at work here, notably the pronounced dearth of mutual respect and civility rife in the country. I, along with Putnam and Garrett (2020, The Upswing) believe this problem originated in the 1960s when everyone and their brother (or their sister) quite abruptly and magically decided whatever the hell they thought, believed, and wanted was the end-all and be-all basis for making any decision coming down the pike. Find your marriage difficult? Give it up, screw your kids and spouse (and maybe someone else’s spouse, too), and move on. Feel like going all out for that financial kill-shot? To hell with your employees and other stakeholders. Living in a miserable city and still wanting to indiscriminately preserve all of the US wild and agricultural lands that you never see? To hell with the national economic infrastructure and national security. To hell with tuition costs and medical costs, too: must make and take money, money, money. Don’t like people with seriously held views that differ from yours? Piss on them, and, for God’s sake, don’t let them talk at all about what they worry is going wrong.
Then, of course, there is the flat-lined to declining wage and wealth growth for the great majority of the nation – while a small minority of that same nation makes out like super hero bandits. This particular toothache has been progressively (sic!) generating a whole lot of bad feelings for about 50 years now, and has induced a whole lot of entirely counter-productive stress on a whole lot of people in the country. In the meantime, both ‘major’ political parties do very little, if anything at all, to address this big problem and reduce the chronic and acute strain on the great bulk of the citizenry.
So, in the US we already have this extremely uncomfortable and anxious bunch of people, and then a seasonal virus comes around that adds a relatively small increment of deaths to the nation’s annual mortality rate (see the graph below) and the ‘authorities’ pretty much muff the whole thing, acutely and now chronically overreacting, and regressively further beating the unholy crap out of the majority of the people who are already suffering from extremely difficult economic and other problems.1
Presumably, it’s not going entirely unnoticed that people who are on the weak, very mangy hindquarters of this very sick national dog are not responding particularly well at all to the chronic and acute strains they especially are under right now.
Triage? By far, the first and most important thing to do is to immediately quit playing doctor with ‘The COVID’ and let the country quickly return to something closer to normality. That’s an immediate relief, a symptom-reducing aspirin, and just the start of the many things needing attending to by us all.
See review of the worldwide course of the disease posted by Dr. Malcom Kendrick here: https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/04/24/covid19-taking-stock/