America: We need to talk

I'm sure you've seen this map over the pas few days. It's been featured prominently on social media and news outlets. It shows the 20 year life expectancy gap between different regions in the United States.

It's no surprise that the discrepancies fall along the blue-red divide. As Michael Hiltzik writes in the Los Angeles Times:

But COVID is far from the only explanation for America’s dismal trend line. The pandemic accounted for about half the decline in life expectancy, according to the CDC. “Unintentional injuries,” a category that includes drug overdoses, contributed an additional 16%, followed by heart disease (4.1%), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (3%) and suicide (2.1%).

Those factors haven’t occurred in a vacuum. They’re connected to what the CDC called “the social determinants of health” — “economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies, racism, climate change and political systems.”

Americans with the shortest life expectancies “tend to have the most poverty, face the most food insecurity, and have less or no access to healthcare,” Robert H. Shmerling of Harvard Medical School wrote in October. “Additionally, groups with lower life expectancy tend to have higher-risk jobs that can’t be performed virtually, live in more crowded settings, and have less access to vaccination, which increases the risk of becoming sick with or dying of COVID-19.”

Let's take a look at Mississippi. At an average life expectancy of 72 years, Mississippi has the worst life expectancy in the country. Mississippi is also the state whose abortion law led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But, as Hiltzik notes in quoting the dissent in the case:

“Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the country, and some of the highest rates for preterm birth, low birthweight, cesarean section, and maternal death,” they wrote. “It is approximately 75 times more dangerous for a woman in the state to carry a pregnancy to term than to have an abortion.”

This is not by accident. Governors like Mississippi's Tate Reeves are more concerned with honoring Confederate history than with providing citizens with healthcare and a clean environment. They and their like accuse expensive blue states of being unaffordable; yet, their states are literally deadly. That's what you get when you subscribe to an ideology which has no concern for the commonwealth, but is instead focused on carrying out punitive measures on imagined moral failings. Democrats and liberals can be faulted for, well, being "too liberal". But conservative states seem to be actively trying to kill their residents.

However, what happens in Mississippi or Alabama isn't confined to those states. Their pathologies drag down the nation as a whole. They don't exist in isolation. US life expectancy has given up all the advances made in the past two decades, while lifespans in the rest of the wealthy countries are rebounding from the pandemic. 

Covid isn't the explanation for the decline, though, since it had begun before the pandemic. While other nations had increased their life expectancies, America's had plateaued. And then it crashed with Covid, compounded by illnesses exacerbated by the gaping social and economic divides in the country. 

There was a video I watched the other day. It gamed out what would happen if the US joined the war on Ukraine's side. And the host of the video sardonically said: "The US doesn't give its citizens healthcare or a safety net, but it knows how to blow up stuff." This is the crux of the problem we face as a society: We focus on power projection, on maintaining global hegemony, while ignoring that to be strong and respected abroad we have to be healthy and secure at home. 

Racism, misogyny, classism; all these contribute to disparate health and welfare outcomes. Lack of hope for the future engenders apathy. Apathy is what the people who run the worse-off states count on to maintain their power. If citizens are too beat down, too resigned to their lot in life, then they won't take the steps to reclaim what is rightfully theirs: a chance at a decent life. But, let's be frank: too many of those same citizens who are suffering at the hand of red state policies also vote for the officeholders enacting those policies. Between apathy and willful self-harm this country is in a predicament.

And as we've seen since the midterms, this divide is getting worse. States are enacting more and more draconian laws affecting rights and welfare. Rather than legislating for their constituents' benefit, they pursue their mindless culture wars. For the moment they've been stymied on the national stage, so they're pursuing a local state strategy. They know they have only a finite amount of time to win the war, and they're going all out. The result will be more death and more devastated lives. But it doesn't matter, of course; after all, Jesus is coming soon, right around the corner.

"Make America Great Again" is a cruel hoax. The movement's policies are in fact being enacted all across the country. The results are far from the "greatness" promised. Nothing would assure this Republic's demise than their implementation in all fifty states.

I have no easy solution to this. We are making progress. But in many regions we are regressing. Businesses won't go to states where the residents are ill-educated and sick. And yes, the Democratic Party needs to go even into red Mississippi and contest elections. But don't fool yourselves: Democrats lose for a reason. The rot is in deep, and there is no simple fix. This will be a long battle.

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