November, 2020
Washington, Lincoln, Berlin – This week the number of Covid-19 cases per 100,000 population was 1345 in Berlin; 2818 in the Washington DC suburb Montgomery County; 4098 in Lancaster County, Nebraska; and 5252 in Nebraska overall.
This is bad news all around, but why the disparities? The easy answer is that the more the people fought against the virus with proven countermeasures, the more it paid off.
The harder question is why the character and will to fight is so weak in Nebraska, and in Great Plains states generally.
One factor seems to be the susceptibility of populations to partisan political propaganda, which, for whatever reasons (mostly spurious), has been discouraging Covid countermeasures, both subtly and overtly. Nebraska, overall, has been blanketed for months with political messaging downplaying Covid; Lincoln not quite so much, being a city with competitive parties; Montgomery County even less, being the home of many scientific organizations and agencies, including NIH and FDA.
Berlin is mostly beyond the reach of American commentators on Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, and One America Network. It also knows the destructive power of political propaganda, having once succumbed to the master who perfected it, Joseph Goebbels.
Nebraska is showing faint and belated signs of resistance to its state political leadership, which incredibly has refused for months to look at numbers of cases and has actually threatened action against local governments that want to put up a fight against Covid with all tools at their disposal. More cities and counties are finally beginning to take matters into their own hands. They have been encouraged to do so by the Nebraska medical community, which itself was slow off the mark but finally came to understand that they should not have lent their credibility to the half-measures and winks of state officials that kept the leadership in favor with the propagandists rather than going all out to save lives.
What Nebraska could use now are a few football analogies directed toward its political leadership, to encourage them show a change of heart: Stop calling the same play that doesn't work (hoping for available hospital beds); fully use the running, passing, and kicking games (contact-tracing, mask mandates, shelter-in-place where necessary); play hard all four quarters; make a fourth quarter comeback.
Also: Flip the channel on television sets away from govertainment to sports where the players follow the rules or are tossed out, and to science and nature programs, where pursuing truth is valued above all.
