Willed Helplessness Is the American Condition

If a pandemic is a lens onto how we understand our moral responsibility to the community, this moment of risk discourse is revealing that we don’t care about one another very much. In place of yesterday’s calls to “flatten the curve,” today a kind of willed helplessness has stiffened into place, an emotional rigor mortis.

On the day last spring that a federal judge the CDC’s mask mandates on public transportation, I got tangled up trying to adjust my son’s mask before entering his kindergarten, the chill air biting my fingers. The wind howled, and I felt like howling too. Months later, I still do. In the third year of the coronavirus pandemic, we as a nation have largely resumed life as normal: We’ve dropped mask mandates, made information about case rates harder to access, adopted the sunny view that Omicron is “mild.” But some of us have had a hard time ignoring the ongoing risks, in my case because I