Whether on late night TV or blaring from a radio, you’ve probably heard the pitch countless times: “Come on down to the lot and have your kids enter for a chance to win free in-state college tuition; lease your dream vehicle and qualify for a million-dollar lottery card; finance with us and we’ll give you Mets tickets; buy a car and we’ll even pay your outstanding parking tickets.” We’ve heard this schtick so often and for so long we probably don’t even register it anymore. The last new marketing campaign to come from Detroit was “employee discount” rates, and that was what, fifteen years ago? The problem here isn’t that car buying is still a weird universe of its own, it’s that local politicians are using the same techniques to encourage people to get the Covid vaccination. The four examples above are all true offers from state and local officials this past month—whether Mets tickets can be considered an “incentive” is a discussion for another day.
No
matter your age, income, or neighborhood, it is impossible not to know that the
Covid vaccine is around, available, and free (well you don’t get charged—our
grandchildren are screwed when the financing for this hits their tax bills).
And while initial lines to get the vaccine resembled refugees trying to gain entry
into a friendly country, for the past few weeks the numbers have slowed down
considerably. We are at the point where, for various reasons, millions of
J&J shots may go unused by the end of the month and will no longer have
approved viability. While I happily rolled up my sleeve this April, it seems
that there is, in a Jimmy Carter kind of way, a national malaise about Covid
and the vaccine. Sure there are petulant anti-vaxxers, but their total numbers
are a rounding error against the general population. Perhaps we are now at a
national boy-who-cried-wolf inflection point when it comes to believing anything
the government says.
The
populace has always been leery of boasting politicians, but they have never
believed every word from them anyway. Where new wounds have been opened is from
the permanent bureaucracy, and it has only itself to blame. At the beginning of
Covid, Dr. Fauci’s words were as close to Moses’s tablets as we could come. A
year later he’s become a caricature of himself, wearing two masks to a
hearing with the national infection falling like a dead Wuhan bat and millions
of people getting vaccinated. While it’s easy to whack at the Fauci piṅata,
none of the political or bureaucratic institutions have gotten anything right
about Covid. We can’t even figure out if the virus came from a lab or wet
market. We can’t even get the Chinese to admit it came from China.
We
now live in a circular firing squad of distrust. The passenger who is taken off
a plane for not wearing a mask points to BLM rioters who ravaged cities for the
sole purpose of stealing and destruction. The otherwise law-abiding citizen
loses faith in the police when the cops did nothing about the stealing and
destruction. And everyone looks at governors who arbitrarily called their jobs
“non essential” and threw otherwise law-abiding and police-respecting citizens
into unemployment for no discernible reason.
Traditionally,
Americans in times of true crisis are willing to inconvenience themselves and
temporarily subordinate their rights for the greater good because we trust a
terrestrial authority. The past year has given every doubter and naysayer a
lifetime of ammunition to simply ignore authority. Why trust authority when, if
it comes to maintaining law and order or merely distributing a vaccine, life is
just a lottery ticket? Should we care? Absolutely. Because the last thing
anyone takes seriously now is the people to whom we should have at least some
deferential respect and obedience. Sometimes your life, or the lives of many,
depend on it. But it seems that all these leaders do is fumble around and
bemoan their missing masks, from the President on down.
If
there is a happy tale to tell, a friend of mine got his J&J shot earlier
this year and reported unusual efficiency at the vaccine site. He also noted
the National Guard was running the operation, so at least one governmental
organ could show how to make things work. Perhaps we could commandeer a few car
salesmen to work the airwaves, asking us how they can get a needle into our
arms instead of how to get us into their cars. Sure some screamer may slap down
a C-note and proclaim that for a hundred bucks you can drive away with a new
car, but somehow it works. Nobody likes buying a car, and nobody really trusts
the car salesmen. But they know how to make a sale, and for our collective
health we can’t do any worse.
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