It’s Our Turn
As I write this, on a weekend billions of people are commemorating the resurrection of a man 1,990 years ago, most of the planet is engulfed in fear. But not everybody is drinking from the cup of anxiety.
Some on the planet are courageously (or fearlessly — the two are different but hard to differentiate) standing on the ramparts and fighting for our lives. The healers are fighting for us. They are fighting an ingenious enemy. A ferocious enemy. An enemy worthy of our best minds, hardest efforts, greatest sacrifices, and unswerving perseverance to hanging on while cocooned with those we share a roof with until the all clear is sounded. We will defeat this enemy. Not without losses on our side, no. But we defeated tuberculosis, polio, and any number of other pathogens set to eradicate us, and we prevailed.
To defeat this thing requires a complete reset of the priorities that brought us into a world more interdependent than any time in history. Fortunately, as in other times of great collective crisis, labels that drove political decisions about resource allocation continue to diminish as more humans around the planet fall. A sense of shared mortality informs the demise of the blazing firebrands. Those iconic jewels describing “us versus everybody else” and that sent us to war on ourselves and others for the last 100 years turned to dried paste round about Saint Patrick’s Day this year.
Probably no greater example of an exciting symbol of power brought low is the loss of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The ship cost $4.5 billion in 2007 dollars. It weighs (or displaces to be precise) 105,000 tons. It is a floating city for 5,000 souls, with an airport and two nuclear reactors. Today, as I write this, it is combat ineffective. That is, it cannot fulfill the purpose for which it was designed. Except for pulling up next to a port city and using its reactors to make electricity (think New York post-Sandy but not Tulsa post-tornado), we really can’t use it for anything constructive. Not since a mushroom cloud appeared over Nagasaki, Japan, seventy-five years ago has the US effectively used the violence unleashed by an aircraft carrier (or destroyer or tank or bomber) to achieve a desired political objective. Our violence has achieved many objectives, but none with the desired outcome. That fact has not affected how we prioritize spending in this country. And while we waited — nay, pined — for a worthy barbarian to arise from the mist, the mist carried a foe more lethal than the US seems to have imagined possible.
Using a body count as a measure of effectiveness (our preferred technique since the Vietnam War), the coronavirus is on track to kill more Americans than were lost to all the enemies we have faced since the North Koreans attacked to the south in June 1950. From then to 2020, from Seoul to Hanoi to Baghdad to Kabul, our combat losses are close to 100,000 men and women.
Today, more people are dying and faster than in any of the aforementioned conflicts. They are dying for lack of healers and their tools. The un-healers and our tools are next to worthless in this fight, this real life-and-death fight. How many N95 masks would $4.5 billion buy? The answer is roughly two-and-a-half billion masks. The aircraft carrier sits in Guam, dead in the water. The doctors and nurses in New York need $1.85 masks to keep from getting sick as they fight every day to save the life of a stranger.
It’s our turn. First, we have to defeat COVID-19. But when we have stopped it, buried our dead, and considered how we got here, it will be our turn to go into the upcoming elections and vote ruthlessly. It’s our turn to shape the future with a devastating departure from our past, a past marked with great achievement and great liberty, for some; and great pain and great injustice, for many.
This November, we vote. As we do, let us remember the heroes, the real heroes, the healers who fought and died on the ramparts in hospitals, nursing homes, and rural clinics. Let us use the bloodless weapon of the ballot box and eliminate every decision maker who fiddled while the world went up in flames.
Originally from Macon, Georgia, Tony Schwalm spent much of his adult life as an Army officer, serving as a tank company commander in the First Gulf War in 1991 and leading Green Berets during the Haiti invasion in 1994. Retiring from the Army in 2004, he works as a consultant to the Department of Defense and lectures to business students at the University of South Florida on the merits of improvisation as learned in the world of guerrilla warfare. In 2009, his essay, Trek, won first prize at the Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference at the University of North Texas and was the basis for the book The Guerrilla Factory: the Making of Special Force Officers, the Green Berets published by Simon and Schuster in 2012. He makes his home in Tampa, Florida.
