In previous entries, I've mentioned my trepidation with President Trump as role model. My concerns have now broadened to how the United States itself is perceived by its children and by the rest of the world.
Thanos, as I discussed in President Thanos, is a Marvel Comics villain whose solution to overpopulation and economic hardship in the universe is to simply kill half of all sentient life. After the halving, resources therefore become abundant in a relative or per capita sense. It's Thanos' economic solution.
The last couple of weeks during this pandemic, the storyline being sold as necessary by President Trump and the GOP is that additional tens of thousands of deaths are required so as to get the economy up and running as soon as possible. The United States has shifted from an attempt to actually contain and eradicate the virus to a strategy, known well by Thanos, called harm reduction. I'll get into the built-in self-contradictions of this approach in a future entry. For now, I have just a few nagging questions.
How does anyone explain the prioritizing of economic re-opening over tens of thousands of lives to eight-year-olds or 12-year-olds or adolescents? What effect will it have on them to learn that they are, in essence, living in the United States of Thanos?
Children in America have grown up with religious, pop culture, and familial mores wherein lives have intrinsic value far beyond money. What happens when their eyes are opened to the cold-blooded cultural villainy on display by their parents and their president? Will children be horrified by what their parents have become? Or, possibly worse, will children adopt these new economic priorities themselves?
How and why did the United States come to a juncture where its leadership's economic decisions echo the actions of the most infamous cultural villain of the last decade?
Since other nations are not following the United States' example, what will occur when American children realize that the rest of the world views us as callous, sadistic misanthropes? For a generation growing up with Disney films, the sudden unveiling of this new American visage promises to be jarring in a deep and mentally disturbing way.
Isolated from the rest of the world, faced with hostile unfamiliar challenges, American adults are being revealed in all of their Lord of the Flies savagery. What will our children think of us?
Bob Dietz
May 14, 2020
