Workers machines and life of the elderly

These articles about the response of people to the coronavirus epidemic also reflect on larger issues of life ethics, social solidarity, and preparedness for events like this.

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Stephen Maher reflects on his 2,400-km drive back to the sanity of Canada from Florida, where the beaches were open, people filled bars, and many just couldn't seem to grasp 'why everyone is panicking'.

 Canadians are divided, politically and geographically, but compared with our neighbours, our divisions are trifling. I have been impressed with the way governments of different political stripes have handled this crisis in this country. There are disagreements, as is proper in a democracy, about the best course to take, but the virus has not been turned into a political weapon, as it has in the United States, where attitudes about the illness sharply diverge on partisan lines.
I am afraid that partisan division, fuelled by a narcissistic, attention-seeking president, is going to cost the Americans dearly..I think social solidarity is why the curve is so flat in traditionally collectivist East Asian societies, and rising so sharply in the United States...
In South Korea, Taiwan and Japan—modern, free-market democracies—governments and populations quickly pivoted to change behaviour. (Cultural norms around mask wearing and lower levels of obesity are likely also important factors in reducing infection and death rates in Asia.).1

Mr. Russell Moore is the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He reminds us that Christianity teaches that every single human life is valuable, even during a pandemic and God doesn’t want us to sacrifice the old. He picks up a concern from a generation ago expressed by essayist and novelist Wendell Berry about treating people like machines.

 Vulnerability is not a diminishment of the human experience, but is part of that experience. Those of us in the Christian tradition believe that God molded us from dust and breathed into us the breath of life. Moreover, we bear witness that every human life is fragile. We are, all of us, creatures and not gods. We are in need of air and water and one another.
A generation ago, the essayist and novelist Wendell Berry told us that the great challenge of our time would be whether we would see life as a machine or as a miracle. The same is true now. The value of a human life is not determined on a balance sheet. We cannot coldly make decisions as to how many people we are willing to lose since “we are all going to die of something.”2

Catholic Social Teaching in this century and the last is in agreement with the concept that the object of work is the worker.

Threat to human treatment in the workplace

Maher observes that we are lucky to call this country home, and that we ought to do what we can to make sure it remains the kind of place where people look out for one another.