Normalizing

We do this a lot. We "get used to it".

WaPo, Margaret Sullivan:

Comparing the number of deaths from covid-19 to those caused by car crashes never made any sense. But the gimmick caught on anyway.

“We don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways,” said Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). “It’s a risk we accept so we can move about.” President Trump also took up the bogus argument while deploying his trademark exaggeration, insisting that car-related deaths are “far greater than any numbers we’re talking about.”

In fact, cars kill about 40,000 people a year. Virus-related deaths hit 70,000 in only two months and are growing fast — and yet this comparison still doesn’t even take into account its disproportionate toll on health-care workers, nor the thousands of survivors who will suffer poor health for years, nor, oh yeah, the fact that car accidents aren’t contagious.

• 100,000 gun casualties every year, with 15,000 - 30,000 dead
• 400,000 tobacco-related dead every year
• 25,000 - 45,000 dead every year due to clinical errors
• 100,000 deaths in the US due to air pollution (7 million worldwide)

Unfortunately, when you put things in that context, it all starts to sound "reasonable".

But stop a minute, and understand what Ms Sullivan is telling us - that if we allow it, we become inured to the suffering of others, and by extension, to our own suffering as well.

We start to accept it all as "the cost of doing business".

I always go back to the apocryphal story of Eisenhower, contemplating the invasion of France in Operation Overlord (paraphrasing):

"We can make these decisions over dinner - we can decide to conquer and destroy most anything we please. But unless we stop to consider the cost in terms of the blood, and the suffering, and the lives of our fellow soldiers, we risk losing our humanity." 

- and (Sullivan, quoting Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez) -

“The problem with normalizing deaths,” they wrote in a recent essay for the Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs at Brown University, where Lutz is an anthropology professor, is that “it allows more deaths. It makes it easier for the horrors of virus deaths to fall off the broadcast news chyron, to divert resources away from public health and for future politicians to treat the next pandemic even more glibly.”

Cult45 is demanding sacrifice from us that they're not willing to make themselves, which is bad enough, but they're also demanding we take the next step and actively contribute to sacrificing each other in order to keep them in power.