America has only 4.5% of the world’s population, yet more than a quarter of all the world’s deaths from COVID-19. That’s in large part because of the hucksters of baloney optimism in the White House. Trump and his campaign salesmen left the nation all but defenseless for months while the virus picked up energy and readied itself to rage across the country.
We were told that what would soon be labeled a pandemic wasn’t really all that bad and was going to vanish like a miracle; nothing to worry about. Those egg-head scientists, they implied, are anti-capitalist alarmists out to sink the president’s reelection. The “cure” of shutting down the country and “imposing” social distancing, we were told, is tyrannical, has turned the nation into one vast internment camp and is far, far worse than the disease itself.
Tell that to the Navajo and Pueblo peoples who are suffering horribly from the novel coronavirus in their marginalized and impoverished communities around our state. It is estimated now that Native Americans in New Mexico, who comprise only 10% of the population, account for over half of all COVID-19 cases here.
Baloney optimism, motivated by political con artists, turns out to be as inflexible and futile as do-nothing pessimism and its evil twins, racial and cultural prejudice.
All are selling a hateful and rigid bias, defending as “patriotic” their scoffing superiority, world weary cynicism and righteous, defiant self-interest. When it comes to the negative bias of prejudice, the message is always devastatingly simpleminded and monstrously wrong. Racism directed at Native Americans says that a whole group of people refuse to be “good Americans,” are too lazy to help themselves and therefore deserve all the misery that comes their way. This is still the view of many “whites” who portray victims of neglect and inequality as shiftless predators out to undermine the white man’s so called “burden” of a “hard earned” shop till you drop way of life.
In an opinion piece last week in the Albuquerque Journal, three members of the Native American Budget and Policy Institute reminded readers that “to suggest that Native Americans have not done their part to socially distance is not only empirically false but also ignores the real social inequalities and institutional racism that we have faced for generations that have helped fuel the spread of COVID-19 in Native communities.” Environmental racism — dumping pollution on Native and other marginalized communities — leaves the health of Native people compromised and vulnerable.
To help banish the stereotype of the “lazy Indian,” I recommend reading “Left Handed, Son of Old Man Hat: a Navajo Autobiography.” The life story of Navajo writer Walter Dyk, Left Handed, is rich in the values that American philosopher and psychologist William James praised as being anti-pessimist and pragmatic in the sense of making the immense effort it takes to improve one’s life and the life of one’s community through knowledge, action and adaptability.
Dyk writes of his father’s advice, “If you want to learn about horses, sheep, cattle and properties, if want to have those things, you don’t want to be lazy…You have to work hard for all these things. You have to fight everything, the heat in summer and the cold. Everything is hard to get, even little things. If you’re lazy you can’t get anything…. You must be lively all the time.”
This Navajo view is the opposite of helpless pessimism, which results in inactivity, and helps to dispel prejudice, which causes indifference, both synonymous with a kind of indolence that is the dead-end of hope.
Pessimism and prejudice have a closed-mindedness that won’t respond to data, to experience or to what life validates or proves false. Even if pessimism is meant to avoid the letdowns of hocus-pocus optimism, good intentioned or not, it sees the world as predetermined and not worth the effort to try to change.
William James and Old Man Hat have in common what’s come to be called in American philosophy the pragmatic method, judging ideas and attitudes by the consequences they have in real life. Both wise men hold that realistic effort, hard work that adjusts its approach to the obstacles and opportunities presented by the actual world, allows for the chance that good things can happen. It’s what James called amelioration, the effort to make things better.
When your mind is closed shut and won’t budge, when your partisanship is so rigid you see ideas or data that oppose your own as “fake news,” or when you’re so down in the dumps, so convinced of the futility of it all you can’t make efforts to improve your situation, then all positive action is impossible, frozen in a rigid negativity. The same holds true for cold-blooded prejudice.
Worst of all you can’t, or won’t, check to see if your ideas actually work, or if they are faulty and need to be adjusted. The pragmatic method can also be called the scientific method — have an idea, test it, see how experience reacts to it. If it works then keep it, if doesn’t, either fix it or dump it. Let experience — not partisanship, prejudice, pessimism or fraudulent optimism — be your guide.
The horrific experience the world is having with COVID-19 — its often excruciating consequences, its easy transmission, its mounting death toll — shows us that not taking it seriously enough to do what is necessary to protect people from it is ONLY a good idea if you want to kill people off in large numbers. “Reopening” society too fast or too soon most probably will do just that. William James would have us ask, “What is it that Trump and his Republicans want that would be worth all those deaths?”
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
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