An Argument In Favor Of Persepective

I am going to wade again into the ethical and moral arguments associated with Covid-19 event following on from my post of March 15.

And before I go on and earn the approbation of being insensitive and uncaring, I'd like to state, without reservations, that yes, I do think this is a particularly nasty and insidious disease. I am following the guidelines set by my government for restrictions on movement. I am quite aware that I am in one of the highest risk groups and am being careful.

That being said, one cannot just ignore the social and ethical consequences of our decisions concerning containing this contagion. Where we are now, is not balanced and is not sustainable. It can be maintained for some period (not too long). But after that, there are going to be serious repercussions for the very fabric of our way of life.

I am not pretending that I have an answer. I just know that the current attitude and decisions are not sustainable. So without pretending to have an answer, I do want to frame the discussion in different terms. I want to give a different perspective on what we are experiencing in hopes of promoting difficult but rational conversation and decision-making.

First Point - Disease and Contagion have always been a part of human life

Cholera, Typhoid Fever, Typhus, Scarlet Fever, Bubonic Plague, Polio...up until the Polio vaccine in the 1950s, significant contagions where a part of human life. No one liked them. The pain of loss was horrible. And a lot of people died year-after-year-after-year. But life went on. Society went on. Since the Polio vaccine, we've enjoyed a 60-year window without such a contagion. Maybe that is a fluke. Maybe it is just not realistic that we can live in a world without a higher level of disease driven mortality rate.

Second Point - How Much Death Are We Really Dealing With?

Yes, yes, yes. I know. If you are the one that dies, or one of your loved ones dies, the effect is devastating. But when dealing with an entire species, that thinking is irrational. We have to think about the whole...that the good of the many is more important than the good of the few. As of today, the reported death toll from Covid-19 was 74,595. Let's assume through the rest of 2020 that number grows by 10 times and around 750 thousand dies! OMG.! That's horrible right?

But...Oh, Wait...did you know that 1.35 million people die each year in automobile accidents worldwide. Each year! But I haven't heard anyone suggest that we should shut down our world economy until such time as car makers stop supplying these tools of death.

Another data point - in 2004, the genocide in Rwanda killed over a million in a single year. The international community did virtually nothing. They certainly did not stop the whole international economy to bring an end to the killing. In 1984 the Ethiopian famine killed off another million in a year. We got Live Aid concerts. But no stop to our world economic order. Since 2014 450 thousand have died in Syria...no call for everyone to stop all economic activity.

I can point out example after example after example of similar situations in our world history where we accepted a mortality rate much higher than we do today.

There are those who talk about how this disease will rebound and how it will be around for a long time. keeping on killing people Well if that is the case, maybe what we must do is just accept a level of mortality that is more in keeping with what we as a species have experienced over the total of our existence?

Maybe we just need to keep it in perspective and realize that a higher mortality rate is the price we are going to have to pay to maintain our civilization.

No Society Can Afford To Save Everyone And Survive

I was listening to the television today. The Governor of New York made the following statement. (I paraphrase). "If it takes us shutting down our entire economy to save 5,000 lives, we will do it. Life is invaluable. We will do whatever it takes to save a life."

This is so wrong.

In fact, no society has the economic capability to save all lives. The world we live in has limits. If you have ever studied power curves you know that it takes more and more resources to achieve smaller and smaller results as you approach trying to attain 100% results. All systems that work understand this. One simply does not have the resources to achieve perfection. You will use up all your resources in the attempt.

Our society has been on this "avoid all pain and all loss no matter the cost" for a long time now. There is no way we can afford to do this. Now I will and do accept that this pandemic is one that may call for extraordinary efforts. But believe me, on this, the pain and loss from shutting down our entire world economy will be much greater and devastating to people than our leaders are calculating or acknowledging. They glibly say we should all be in this together for the greater good. But they will not be the ones who will see massive losses of their incomes as all the hourly and gig economy workers will. They will not be the ones on the margins of society who see the equation of their well-being tip to unstainable. They will make sure that the elite are made whole but the ordinary people will be the ones who will take years upon years to recover as they always do.

A healthy biosphere as to cull itself. Not all can or should survive. (And believe me, I know I am in the high-risk group that this disease is targeting and may well be the one culled!) Fight this yes. But understand that there is should be an acceptable level of loss. That is reality.

Dealing With Death

Not anyone in my family but with one of my clients. And not an actual death, but a client who has developed a particularly virulent form of cancer.

It is an aspect of growing older that death processes and events start happening with more frequency. For me personally, the death first of my mother, but much more intensely, that of my father brought the whole dying process and all that it entails into clearer focus.

This year I've had two clients contract cancer that has led to planned succession processes to being accelerate up. In the first case we were already in the process of doing a sale to the proposed successors. In the second case, the cancer diagnosis came out of the blue. The client is only in his late 50's. The cancer is particularly bad with no track record of responding to traditional treatment.

We found out about this in May. Since then my partner and I have been working in overdrive to put into place a mechanism to fulfill the client's goals of taking care of his wife and seeing that his company would continue beyond him. While initially the path to attaining his objectives seemed to be difficult, I can say that we along with the firm's attorneys have managed to put in place a fairly simple (a relative term) process to obtain the client's objectives.

Today we were meeting with the proposed successor owners and then with the client, his wife and his attorneys to try and make major progress on our proposed solutions. The meetings went well but it was very emotional. This is not the kind of work that you seek out to do, but knowing that you are trusted and making an exceedingly serious contribution to someone's potential end-of-life event is really an honor. To be honest, I'm a bit drained.

But on another level, I feel blessed not just to be of serious assistance to the client and his wife, but also to just be participating and learning from the process. It might sound morbid but I think a lot about dying and how I want to manage my own process. I mean it's going to happen. Each one of these experiences that I participate helps me formulate my own personal game plan. (Think Kirk Douglas and the old movie 'The Vikings' - maybe hard to do on the Rio Grande)