The apt metaphor, I think, for what we have done to ourselves in response to this virus is the tourniquet. Leave it on too long and gangrene sets in. You can watch your own body begin to die and rot and stink.
“Ah, but it’s just a limb,” you say. “It’s worth losing a limb to save a life!”
Is it? What sort of life we are saving? Will the body so maimed still be able to walk, to run, to hunt, to work, to fight, to live? America even before this crisis was a nation grievously ill, sick with internal strife and disorder; its organs and parts attacking one another in a spreading collapse of harmonious function. If the cells and tissues of the body cannot even make the most basic discrimination of organic life — that between “self” and “other” — and if they cannot maintain the fundamental unity of purpose that must exist for any creature to sustain life, how can the body as a whole survive a shock as terrible as the one that has now set us reeling?
Anyone who has ever suffered a serious wound knows that you don’t really feel it at first; the body knows to suppress the pain long enough for us to try to stumble (or fight) our way to safety. It is only later that the real pain and shock and sepsis set in. I think we have not yet begun to understand the terrible scope of this injury — or how much of it we have, in our fear, inflicted upon ourselves.
Meanwhile: all around us, and within us too, are opportunistic pathogens. They will not fail to see their chance.