Your Rugged American Individualism Is Making You Dangerous

On Friday afternoon, under a gray and balmy sky, President Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden and declared a national emergency. Yet there was little in his personal behavior to suggest that there was any kind of emergency at all. He had recently come into contact with several people who have been confirmed to have contracted Covid-19, yet he was still not going into self-quarantine, the protocol recommended by pretty much every medical professional—including the NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man speaking with Trump at the press conference. Instead, Trump was going about his regular business, pointing fingers, and, worse, shaking hands. At the press conference, he almost made a show of it, making contact with every CEO who had flown to Washington to take part in the announcement, gripping all of their hands, doing the very thing doctors are pleading with us not to do. It’s almost like he was doing all of it on purpose.

Several reporters asked Trump why, despite interacting with infected individuals, he was not following medical guidelines and going into self-quarantine.

Because, he said, “we have no symptoms whatsoever,” referring to himself in the first person plural and ignoring the fact that you might be able to spread the virus even if you’re asymptomatic.

Finally, one reporter got to the point. “Are you being selfish?” she asked the President.

If the Commander-in-Chief, who proceeded to dodge the question, is supposed to be a kind of model-in-chief for how Americans should conduct themselves in a moment of crisis, Trump is instead our national mirror. In the face of illness, Americans soldier on. Even when we’re sick, we go to work, we get on flights, we insist on hugging people. This was something I never understood about my adopted country, about why my classmates’ parents sent their kids to school with fevers. (It was an upper-middle class community and all of them had more than enough resources to keep their kids home but insisted on teaching their children some kind of ineffable lesson.) Now in adulthood, I still don’t understand why well-compensated professionals go to the office with dripping noses and proceed to touch things, or why my dinner guests don’t cancel when they’re sick. Having grown up in a house of Soviet doctors, this was one of the most foreign things about the United States. Why, we always wondered at home, did Americans insist on trying to get everyone else sick?

In the thirty years I’ve spent becoming one of you, I’ve come to recognize this as a distinctly American phenomenon, this rugged individualism in so many things. Don’t tread on me! It is my choice whether I go to school or work or a social gathering leaking snot, and you can’t tell me otherwise. And I’m not talking here about underprivileged service workers who can’t afford to stay home from their hourly-wage jobs because they don’t have sick leave. I’m talking about people who have unlimited sick leave, who have the means and education—people who know better.

And yet.

Even as sports leagues, religious institutions, and cultural venues begin shutting down in the face of a global pandemic, many people still don’t quite understand why this is happening or why they need to limit their own activities and movement, especially if they are young and healthy. I have lost count of how many times I’ve had this argument in the last 48 hours. “I’m young and I’m not sick, why do I have to stay home?”or “Even if I get sick, I’m young and healthy, I’ll be fine.” At one point, I’ll admit, I too was in this fight, on the other side, explaining to my mother, a doctor who is beyond panicked at the pandemic prospects we’re facing, why it’s totally fine for me to go to the gym and dine in restaurants and live my life uninterrupted as I damn well please.
“I’ll be fine!,” I argued.

“You’ll be fine,” my mother finally said, exasperated, “but your parents and grandparents won’t be.”

Perhaps it’s because government authorities and healthcare professionals haven’t adequately explained this to us, that the point of staying home, even if you’re young and healthy and otherwise invincible, is not for you, it’s for everyone else. Even if you don’t get sick and die, there’s a good chance you’ll be a silent vector, shedding virus as unwittingly as a dandelion casts off its fluff, making it that much more likely that the old and vulnerable get Covid and die. (Mortality for those in their 80s is estimated to be 15 percent. A WHO report put it at nearly 22 percent.) Maybe it would have an effect if they phrased it as, “You don’t have to cancel your vacation, but you might kill grandma if you don’t,” but I doubt it.

Americans are good at following the rules, and Americans are extremely charitable, but still, deep down, there is that widespread individualism, mixed with that frequent distrust of science when it contradicts your own good common sense, that stiff-upper-lip, mind-over-matter business we inherited from the Brits. It is why some 90 percent of Americans report having shown up to work sick, even with the flu. It is why the anti-vaxxer movement flourishes here. It is why cancer patients vow to “beat cancer,” why they write in obituaries that someone “lost” her battle with cancer, as if it is a personal failing, a sign of spiritual weakness that you somehow allowed the deranged cancer cells to overwhelm your body.

As I write this on a Friday night, DC’s bars are still bumping and friends beckon. I wish they wouldn’t. I wish more Americans were respectful of biology and of its demands. Over the last week, we have seen just how interdependent we all are, how seamlessly interconnected, and how one invisible and inorganic creature can turn those same links into weapons against us, all of us. I wish we recognized that and protected each other. I wish we were as respectful of other people’s bodies, as we are of our own. I wish more Americans would stop going in for a hug when they’re sick, I wish they’d understand that maybe not everyone can function as easily when they’re sick, that they shouldn’t be making the choice of whether someone is sick for the next two weeks for them. I wish more Americans would understand that our rugged individualism in the face of illness is sometimes just plain selfishness. And I wish our president would set a better example.

Julia Ioffe is a GQ correspondent.

Originally Appeared on GQ