The Public Health Doctor, a Parable

Imagine you are under coronavirus lockdown in a NY apartment building with 333 adult fellow tenants. You are an informed, aware person who has been keeping abreast of the current public health crisis and have been tracking public health policy for many years.

You are called upon in this moment to make an important decision, so here is the situation:

The landlord, Dirty Don, a monstrous, insane narcissist and self-serving crook, is roaming the halls night and day, pounding on doors and screaming through a huge bullhorn, insisting that the disease is not serious and will soon go away by magic. He is furiously demanding that people come out, carry on with life as usual, get back to work and pay the rent immediately or face eviction. (He does offer a small discount to anyone willing to join his parade and declare him the wisest, most stable genius ever.)

Dirty Don is ardently backed by 30% of the tenants (100 people) who flatly refuse to take the pandemic seriously, are ignoring public health warnings, going out in public, holding parties and large gatherings, and blithely endangering others. When confronted on their behavior they respond by clamping their hands over their ears and loudly shouting “USA, USA!”

Another 40% of the adult tenants (a 133 person plurality) are disengaged, focused only on their personal concerns. They either lack interest or do not trust that there is any point in participating in any collective action to better their situation. Some anxiously track the news and try to protect themselves while others are in denial and join the Dirty Don faction in their risk-taking.

The remaining 30% (100 souls, of whom you are one) are seriously alarmed, on red alert, believe that this is a real crisis, understand that we have to act together, and want to do the right thing. But many of them are, above all else, frantic to get rid of Dirty Don who is the immediate threat, the Problem that is literally hammering nonstop on their doors and their nerves.

Now imagine that the tenants get to elect a new landlord every 4 weeks and an election is coming up this week. (For the sake of this extended metaphor, let’s substitute weeks for years to reflect the speed at which the virus is moving.)

The 30% who believe in Dirty Don have already coalesced behind him and are very unlikely to change their minds.

Some of the 40% who are disengaged could be brought around and activated with the right candidate and arguments. They are growing weary of Dirty Don, but have been deeply disappointed in the past, feel betrayed and disempowered and have largely given up on the political process. They generally mistrust, and in some cases actively hate, the people they see as the political elite, which includes past landlords and superintendents. Some of them voted for Dirty Don last time just to flip the bird at “The Establishment” but are now having buyer’s remorse and looking for someone else who is not just the same old same old. Many in this group are not giving the election their full attention right now and won’t until it is down to the two final candidates.

The remaining 30% (the 100 pivotal people, including you) are the group that could turn the tide if they could unite and persuade a decent swath of the angry and disengaged 40% to join them.

The problem is that they have to unite behind one champion if they want to win and there is a deep division as to who that champion is.

The Great Divide.

Of these 100, just half (50 individuals) have already voted for whomever they like best or maybe just thought was the best candidate to beat Dirty Don, before the full extent of the crisis or its origins was widely understood.

Of those 50 voters, 20 individuals (out of the 100 possible voters among the 333 tenants in the building) voted for Joe, the building Superintendent. Joe is a familiar figure and reasonably well-liked guy who is friends with a lot of landlords but also with a lot of tenants. Most are not all that enthusiastic about him but he is being strongly hyped by the most powerful and influential tenants in the building.

Another 15 of the 50 who have already voted are very enthusiastically backing and willing to work hard for a well-known public health advocate, Dr. Bernard, who has a long history of being trustworthy and prescient. Dr. Bernard has been warning about a situation like this for years and begging people to prepare. Unfortunately, this annoyed some people who didn’t want to be bothered by his warnings and urgings and felt his proposals were too expensive — although, to be fair, no expense was spared when the Penthouse tenants demanded a private swimming pool installed on the roof — so to date Dr. B and his plans have been summarily dismissed. But now, a lot of people are reconsidering the wisdom of that decision.

The remaining 20 of the 50 already committed voters (out of the 100 actively anti-Don group) voted for other candidates and are all over the map about their second choice.

Remember, 50 of the 100 eligible anti-Don tenants have not yet voted.

Dr. Bernard and his friends understand and are deeply concerned that people have been holed up anxiously in their apartments for weeks. Some are in worse straits than others. Their money is running out. Food is hard to come by. Toilet paper is in short supply. People have become sick and some have died. People are scared about their futures, scared of losing their homes and jobs, and desperate to get back to normalcy. Above all, those not under the sway of the evil landlord are beyond desperate to get rid of him.

In response to the crisis, Dr. Bernard and his supporters quickly pivot to organizing intra-building mutual aid groups, putting out factual health information and raising money to help the poorer tenants keep food on the table. They also keep trying to educate the building population about how things came to this point, what the best practices are at present and what could be done in the future to avoid being in this situation again. Their help is appreciated. Their advice is largely ignored as something people simply cannot deal with in this acute crisis. In fact “harping” on it makes some angry.

Superintendent Joe goes missing in action for a week and then emerges to deliver a canned campaign speech.

A bit more information about the front-runner.

Super Joe, as he is fondly known, has a spotty history. He served as Assistant Landlord in the previous administration, and before that in various positions with the management group that runs the building. In his long career, he has mostly sided with the landlords, including the current one, on a variety of issues of concern to the tenants, like the rat and roach infestations, the dangerously sagging roof, locked emergency doors, missing smoke detectors, the management group’s use of poor quality materials and shady contractors, failure to inspect elevators, leaky plumbing, poor water quality, faulty wiring, lack of heat and sharp cutbacks in cleaning and maintenance.

Some tenants remember all this and are royally pissed off. Others are unaware of his history, but if Joe is the candidate, without a doubt Dirty Don will remind them of it daily. On the other hand, Joe has also made a practice of hanging out in the lobby, greeting everyone by name (though not necessarily the correct name), asking after their kids and handing out candy from time to time. People find him reassuring and likable, if a bit creepy.

Significantly, the Penthouse tenants, who enjoy more than their share of community power, recognition and status, and who happen to control the in-house Public Address System and the Community Newsletter, back Joe as one of their own. Most of them are frankly embarrassed by the current landlord. They would prefer someone with basically the same policies but who did not go around with a bullhorn, banging on doors and calling attention to the reality of the situation and who benefits from it.

Joe’s plan.

According to Joe, the only problem is Dirty Don and the one and only goal should be to get rid of him and a return to the status quo prior to Don, when Joe was the Assistant Landlord. Nothing much matters after that, but Joe hints that his policy will be to reach across the aisle, restore comity, and get things done by making reasonable compromises to find practical, moderate, common sense solutions in the centrist middle ground between the recommendations of public health officials and whatever rightward-moving goalpost the landlords and their minions decide to set.

The details are vague but Joe’s advisors have hinted that in exchange for a temporary 20% reduction in rent (10% for lower income tenants) to be paid back out of tenants’ social security accounts, he would consider implementing some sort of incentive plan to get tenants to go back to work, loosening the distancing restrictions, allowing bigger gatherings and permitting more delivery and service workers, as well as visitors, into the building. He says he would not rule out turning over 80% of the building’s Emergency Fund to the Landlord’s Association to get things back to “normal” as quickly as possible, as he did in the last crisis.

Joe has no plan at all in terms of preparing for emergencies such as this in the future or alleviating the terrible condition in the building that pre-existed the present crisis, although the idea of repainting some of the upper floor hallways has been bandied about. In fact, Joe emphatically insists that nothing fundamental will change when he is in charge, and has told anyone who objects that he has “no empathy” for them, called them names and told them that if they don’t like it, they should vote for someone else. Joe’s more enthusiastic supporters find that behavior bold, authentic and refreshing.

Dr. Bernard and his supporters are aghast. They understand that with a plan like that, Joe is unlikely to prevail over Dirty Don, and even if Joe’s plan is implemented, it will be almost as bad as what the current landlord is touting. Unless the right protocols are observed, in less than two weeks the infection rate will double and in four weeks virtually everyone in the building will be in much, much worse straits than they are today, as bad as that is. And of course there will be even less defense against the next crisis, which is sure to come.

Hearing those objections and noticing that some of the other tenants are considering backing Dr. Bernard, the Penthouse coalition swings into action. They of course favor the plan offered by Super Joe and stand to benefit from a cut of the Emergency Fund stimulus package. They also have plenty of money, can safely remain in their apartments almost indefinitely (and have the option of lounging on that nice pool deck) and can afford to pay others to take risks for them.

It also bears mentioning that the Penthouse people have a vested interest in getting the rest of the tenants back to work with as little fuss as possible, because they always get a 70% cut of the rent money, no matter who is in charge.

Quickly the Penthouse gang corners any other tenant even considering running for landlord and pressures them to call it quits and endorse Joe. They fall into line post haste. One hesitates but she is quickly neutralized.

The Penthouse people hire a bunch of consultants and media experts and get to work using the resources at their disposal to insure that the rest of the anti-Don tenants will rally around their boy. Their prime objective is to get everyone to believe that Super Joe is their only hope of getting the dreaded landlord Don off their backs and to encourage them to hate anyone who supposedly stands in the way of that singular goal.

Now, in addition to the banging and shouting of Dirty Don and his minions, tenants, already at the end of their nerves and wits, are being blasted with a steady stream of Pro-Joe ads blaring over the loudspeakers and slipped under their doors in the daily Newsletter. Any mention of the Bernard campaign is strictly verboten unless it is an attack. The drumbeat continues, as does the insistence that everyone must immediately coalesce behind good old Joe, even though literally HALF of the people who even care to be involved have not yet gotten a chance to weigh in. Any semblance of democratic process must be stopped cold. NOW!

What is to be done?

More and more people are starting to wake up to the fact that Joe the Super is really on the side of the landlord class, and has only a slim and slipping lead over the dreaded Don. It has suddenly come into sharp focus that the underlying problems go way beyond the current crisis and that, while Joe’s policies promise temporary relief, in just four short weeks those policies are likely to put everyone into an even more dire and deadly situation from which there will be no escape.

Dr. Bernard’s supporters point out these realities and insist that we are not even halfway through the vetting process and should not just call it off. But they are met with increasingly dismissive, angry and desperate responses:

First the pleas:

“Please, please, we beg, we implore you, stop criticizing good old Joe. Any criticism, no matter how true, only helps the dreaded Don. We must, must, MUST unite behind our only hope. Can’t you see that?”

“This is not the time! People are hurting right NOW! Nothing else matters. We cannot afford to think about even the short term future, much less long term, so just stop bugging us with it.”

“Please! Our nerves are shot. We need to feel better. You are upsetting us. How can you be so mean and disrespectful? Have you no compassion?”

Then the persuasion:

“Sure, everything you are saying about the system is true, but now is not the time for that. We have to, have to, have to get rid of the deadly Don, and only Joe can possibly do that.” (Sure, because he got the support of the plurality of one half of our 30% slice of the population before this crisis took hold and halfway through the nomination process?)

“Never fear, Joe and his Penthouse Pals can save us. They have a smart plan. If we implement some of the landlord’s policies, like maybe just evict 20% of our fellow tenants — let’s say the poorest 20% and we can maybe even let them use the elevator on their way to the street instead of throwing them out the windows like the Don-fans want — perhaps we can appease some of his supporters and get them to vote with us.” (Despite the fact that it’s never worked in the past, but somehow it will magically work now because we see an emergency that they refuse to even recognize?)

“We know we’re right because every announcement on the Public Address System tells us so, as does every editorial in the building Newsletter. Surely you must see this too.” (Nope.)

Then the honey:

“We’re so sad for you that this is the case, truly we are. We wish it were different and our hearts break for you. But you are 10 points behind half-way through the game, so please be reasonable, throw in the towel and come along.”

“Here’s the deal…If Bernard goes away now and somehow convinces all his supporters to back Super Joe, maybe Joe will let him whisper suggestions in his ear, and maybe, some day in the distant future he’ll think about incrementally implementing some of them…even though he has fought tooth and nail against them all his life.” (Because there’s always hope that for the first time in history, power will concede something without a struggle.)

“Hey, look! Joe promised to select a woman as his second in command. Is that cool or what? Go Joe!” (Sure, the Assistant Landlord is basically just a figurehead, and of course it will have to be a woman who supports the exact same policies that he supports because who knows how long they can keep Old Joe propped up. So, bottom line, come hell or high water we’ll still be in the same pickle either way…but what a great symbolic gesture.)

And finally the rage:

“If that last argument didn’t win you over you are a misogynistic rapist.” (Unlike Joe, who is an innocent victim of the one woman in the world who should not be believed…besides Anita Hill.)

“We don’t disagree with your facts; we disagree with your tone. And also, someone who said they were with you was rude on Twitter. It’s too bad that people have to work for starvation wages and can’t see a doctor when they’re sick, but civility must be maintained, especially in a life and death emergency, and most especially on the part of those at the bottom of the heap. We simply can’t condone rudeness. Plus we hate you because you’re all misogynist, snake emoji rapists working for Putin.”

“Still won’t go along no matter how much we ridicule, scold, blame, insult and despise you? Well then, you are foolish, petulant children who are obstructing our only hope because you didn’t get your way. Selfish, selfish, selfish. You are imposing purity tests. You are unrealistic. Worst of all, you are upsetting us. And it will be your fault if we lose to Dirty Don.”

Your dilemma:

You understand the nature of the plague.

You understand how we got here.

You understand the only hope of getting out of this and preventing it from happening again in the future is to follow an evidence-based public health plan led by someone who accepts the science and will fight like hell to implement it.

You understand that the virus is just one crisis we are facing and that the existential crisis of climate collapse is bearing down on us like a freight train.

You understand that Super Joe and the Penthouse Gang’s plan for any of this is just a short-term stay of execution.

But…but…

BUT people are hurting, desperate, really, really, really want to believe in the person who they have been told will save them. They don’t want facts; they want reassurance, calming words, PEACE! They want the immediate, acute pain and terror they are feeling RIGHT NOW to stop and they believe with all their might that Super Joe is the one to stop it.

It’s your decision: Do you shut up and fall in line?

My personal answer in case you had any doubt: Bloody hell, no!

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PS: This essay may become dated if Joe doesn’t make it to the June or November but tweak it slightly and substitute the name of any neoliberal corporate hack the Democratic establishment has on hand to shove into the empty slot. They’re miraculously interchangeable.