Americans Have Been Conditioned To Die For Our Country For Centuries— COVID-19 Is No Exception
By: Alyssa Satara
Tags: Social Justice, Covid 19, America, Racial Justice, Politics

It is December 21st, and over 318,000 people in the United States have died of COVID. This tragic and alarming number is a clear reflection of the US government’s inability to properly act and react to a global pandemic. It also exposes a deeper issue embedded in the fabric of America. Which is that dying for your country and the “freedom” it represents is acceptable. We are ten months into the pandemic and COVID is at an all-time high. Still, most states are filled with bars packed shoulder to shoulder, busy hair salons, morgue refrigerator trucks parked outside hospitals, and people who refuse to wear masks.

Howcome over 318,000 deaths haven’t been able to puncture our bureaucracy, and what does it mean for our democracy?

A democracy is defined as “government by the people”. What happens to a democracy when it’s people have been indoctrinated to believe that dying for our country is a right of passage or an honor?

We are a country that is constantly at war, and no that isn’t hyperbole, we have only been at peace for 21 years since the birth of America. The United States has been at war for 222 out of 239 years that it’s been a country.

Sacrificing our citizens to preserve our ideologies and comforts is the American way.

Now we are are at war again. Not with the pandemic. Not with the world. We are at war with ourselves — a democracy that doesn’t serve its people but instead believes they are expendable.

Historically in the US, the most disposable people are disenfranchised. It’s the Black, Brown, Indigenous, poor and disabled people that live and die within the realm of a society — a democracy — that does not serve, protect, or value them.

It’s tragic, but not surprising, that the US government has done little to protect their citizens from the pandemic. According to the CDC, compared to their white counterparts, Native Americans are 4 times more likely to be hospitalized from COVID and 2.6 times more likely to die of COVID. While Black and Hispanic Americans have a COVID death rate 2.8 times higher than white people.

We’ve allowed people to die by the thousands in a global pandemic and instead chosen to value schools, restaurants, and shops to stay open — which is very on-brand for America. We are conditioned to sacrifice life for the commodities and comforts that make America feel American. The easiest citizens for the US to sacrifice has traditionally been Black and Brown bodies, a truth that has continued throughout the pandemic. Now a new category has unfolded in the pandemic: older bodies and bodies with preexisting conditions.

We’ve created groups of people who we’ve tucked away and “othered” to ensure we don’t disturb the foundation of America when these groups die in mass ammounts.

“COVID is only killing people with preexisting conditions and the elderly” — I hear way too often in my TikTok comment section when I address the statistic and facts of the virus.

Now that America has lubed us up with the ideology and normalization of dying for our country, we’ve taken it one step further. We label groups of people as being less worthy of life. As if those who get sick easier are okay to sacrifice.

Instead of pulling at the thread and expecting our government to protect us in a global pandemic, we resort back to the fabric of America that we know. The comfortable quilt that allows us to be okay with other groups dying by the thousands.

Of course, the fatigue of it all is real. When the reality of daily life is draped in thousands of daily deaths, it does make sense that people would be desensitized to the hopelessness and gravity of the situation.

Still, it’s imperative to scrutinize the structure of the country that has allowed this to happen.

Like most blemishes on the flawless face of America that we project to the world and to ourselves, there is a deeper root cause that allows our government to operate carelessly and with little priority to the preservation of life.

We are allowing people to die to protect the beliefs and values of America.

We value freedom, for example. We value it so much that we often go to war in honor or defending of freedom. When a crisis came to the shores of America, our values did not budge. Instead of creating national life-saving protocols to protect our citizens, America prioritized “freedom”. It prioritized the Americans who didn’t want to stay home, wear masks, or social distance.

We protected the idea of freedom, but not the embodiment of freedom. While some “freedoms” were protected the freedom to live in conditions where the virus was controlled was sacrificed. My freedoms to ensure myself, my family, and my loved ones can go to the store or the doctors without catching a deadly virus were sacrificed. The lives of over 318,000 people were sacrificed. Not for freedom that protects Americans, but the delusion notion of freedom that allows people to disregard science and grab a drink with a group of friends in the deadliest month of the pandemic.

We have been conditioned and convinced that dying for our country and our ideologies is normal. We’ve failed to utilize our democracy and instead became complacent with the fact that 318,000 people — and counting — have died from a situation that could have been avoided.