Viral Insanity

One of the burdens borne by folks who live alone during our time of crisis is that one of our means of engaging with the world -- ye olde internet and its simple cousin, Social Media -- is also the source of large amounts of weapons-grade stupidity. Hence my quote of National Review writer Jim Geraghty yesterday as he observed there is a very narrow window of appropriate concern about COVID-19 and it almost precisely coincides with one's own opinion of what that concern is.

But now and again comes an opinion which you would think literally could not be held by someone able to type and form sentences. Dr. Sophie Lewis, writing for Open Democracy, suggests that the COVID-19 crisis provides us with an opportunity to take a critically needed step regarding the family: abolition.

Dr. Lewis notes a couple of things in her article which are true. For example, the requirements to shelter in homes present significant danger for people in abusive situations. Because of the web of dependency in which they're enmeshed, abuse victims often have a lot of trouble leaving their abusers for good. Safer-at-home requirements add a layer to that and make it harder to overcome, and restricting the abuser to the home presents more opportunities for abusive behavior to manifest.

She also notes that many homeless people can't effectively shelter in place because the shelters themselves are poor environments for social distancing to begin with and only grow worse if they are filled with people dealing with substance abuse and mental health issues. The homeless often have more physical health problems than others which can leave them more vulnerable to COVID-19 infection and less able to survive a bout with the virus.

But her proposed solutions include the abolition of the nuclear family, freeing prisoners from jails and seizing hotels and large privately-owned homes and letting workers go live in them while still paying them for not working. I'll freely confess I lack the imagination to picture a society organized along these lines, so I'll take Dr. Lewis's word that her ideas would solve the problems she identifies. But the number of problems it creates in their place would easily dwarf them, with the main one being that we had allowed our nation's laws to be designed by a whacko.