Blame the Guilty
Last month, it seemed like the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had one of the best student return plans, which included frequent testing for everyone on campus. “If [the students] adhered to what we asked them to do, we would have no more than 700 cases in an entire semester,” said President of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Robert Jones in the Vox Today Explained podcast.
Instead, they reached that number in the first two weeks.
In the podcast, Jones mentioned “a few bad actors” who nearly ruined all of the university’s hard work by “doing things we didn’t include in the model.” They did include illegal parties in their predictions – okay, okay, so they know they are dealing with college students. But they forgot that college students don’t always answer calls. (Positive test results were delivered over the phone.) And Jones says the deliberate violation of quarantine or isolation orders was “something we didn’t really think was going to happen.”
They seem to have based student safety on an imprecise model. Consequences? As far as I can tell, no for admins. Disciplinary action was taken against students and student organizations.
Julia Marcus and Jessica Gold wrote in July that colleges are preparing to blame students for disease outbreaks that will inevitably trigger decisions by administrators. The prediction came true in record time – until the end of August, there were so many cases at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that they sent students home. Jonathan Sauls, vice-chancellor for student affairs, spoke of “flagrant violations” and “misjudgments” on the part of students.
But whose opinion was the worst here? I would argue that if your plan falls apart as soon as someone breaks the rules, it has never been a solid enough plan to protect the community.
Whose choice means the most?
People can make choices, but responsible people shape the world in which we make choices. We look to our neighbors, our leaders, our environment to judge what options we have and what choices might be most appropriate.
“If you don’t feel safe, don’t leave, ” the Iowa governor said of the football game, which looked like it would be allowed to be played with 25,000 spectators. These precise words have been used to protect other discoveries, such as employees returning to work in the UK or voters entering polling stations in Missouri . But the flip side of this sentiment is that if you really feel safe, it’s okay to walk. It is communicating the basic decision of the community to people who do not have the resources to make that decision in a fully conscious way.
That’s the whole reason we need to have functioning public health agencies: gather evidence and consider how people will respond to recommendations, and then implement the plans that have the greatest chance of keeping everyone safe. It is unreasonable to expect every citizen to be their own epidemiologist when the real epidemiologists in the public health department are those who are trained to do their job properly. Ultimately we rely on instinct, and instinct is wrong. Nothing in our life prepared us to make the right decisions in a pandemic.
Leadership matters because responsible people not only set the rules, but also model the behavior of all of us. If you are at a petting zoo, you assume that every animal is there because it can be petted. If the drug is sold without a prescription, you think it is unlikely to kill you. “This decision was made by someone responsible, who has more information than me,” we think.
When responsible people give up this responsibility, they don’t give the rest of us more control over our lives. They remove good advice and blame us for any harm that may happen to us. As an individual, my choices – if I do the right ones – can protect me and my family. But choosing a leader can protect or hurt thousands of people.
This is true on all scales. A consistent response from the federal government could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives by now. Governors in many cases squandered the strength they had to control the spread of the virus in their states. Even with friends, it’s one thing to decide whether or not to go to a big party. It’s another matter of deciding what to quit is okay .
Responsible people make bad decisions
Instead of using the resources at their disposal to keep people safe, those in charge are trying to maintain all the benefits they enjoyed before the pandemic. Governors lifted lockdown orders under pressure from business owners and political rivals . Colleges opened in person because they faced dire financial consequences if students did not enroll and dorms were left empty . Sport happens because sport makes money .
“Usually shielded from the immediate aftermath of a disaster, elites tend to be far more concerned about disrupting the status quo and losing political capital and power [than the disaster itself],” writes Malka Alder in Foreign Policy. Her essay focuses on the myth of public panic during natural disasters, but this point also explains why people in power tend to make decisions that benefit themselves and then shift the blame down.
And we fall for it. To use the panic as an example, we blamed each other for storing toilet paper during the early pandemic, although on the fact that the real deficit of TP was not because of panic . Since most of the population now poops at home and not at work, toilet paper manufacturers had too many industrial toilet paper rolls and too few of the ones we use at home. Their factories and supply chains weren’t set up to switch from one to the other.
People were stocking up when they could, and this isn’t panic at all – it’s a logical way to respond when you know there are shortages occurring from time to time. But we’ve been complaining about imaginary TP drives with no evidence that accumulation is all over the place. We blamed people for a problem in the system that none of us could control.
Leaders aren’t the only ones who blame people for wrong individual choices: we blame each other. We are fighting shoppers and store owners over masks because wearing masks has become a personal choice that people have strong opinions about. Imagine what it would have been if the US Postal Service had been allowed to fulfill its plan to send five masks to each household back in April . In fact, masks are available and useful. (We would have found something else to fight for, but hopefully it will be something less meaningful.)
Likewise, if people pass COVID to each other in bars, they do so in part because they thought the bars were safe enough to visit. Who made it clear they were safe? People who removed the insulation from the bars.
Likewise, if COVID outbreaks are on the rise on university campuses, students may have played a role, but administrators should n’t have started a damn college if it wasn’t safe to open a damn college. The work of assessing the risks to the entire community cannot be responsibly entrusted to individuals acting alone, especially when they are young people with still developing brains. In fact, these are often the same young people who were forced to return to work after the restrictions were lifted , whose jobs as cashiers and waiters put them at greatest risk of contracting and spreading the coronavirus. Then the leaders also accused them of partying.
So let’s put the blame for community failure back where it belongs: the leaders who made the most important decisions, or more often didn’t make the decisions. Behind every school opening delay and every last-minute canceled conference is bullshit – a leader who knew what to do to keep people safe but feared that someone would get angry if they did.
It’s time for people in charge to step up and call when something needs to be changed or canceled to keep people safe. Even if this decision is unpopular or – so hot – will result in the rich person losing some money. And when the inevitable happens, we must stop pointing fingers at each other and shifting the blame to her place.