“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”

― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

I love reading Asimov- a timeless Sci-Fi writer that has a knack for bringing the occasional zinger of a quote.  The “morals” quote is obviously tongue-in-cheek, similar to the quote “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”  The “morals” quote tricks you at first until you think about it and realize that, wait- he’s saying my morals are questionable? And then you laugh, because you know your morals are just fine. Right?

I bring this up because it appears that we could be facing a morals crisis in our country. Specifically, I would ask; Is our sense of morals getting in the way of doing what is right around the Covid-19 crisis? 

Surely nobody is inflating test statistics, denying treatment for certain classes of people, slowing down testing in certain areas of the country, withholding or delaying supplies or spinning communications to favor one scenario over another?  If the facts on the ground say that yes, these things happened, was it a mistake or was it intentional? If so, why?

So much is going around in the news cycle it’s hard to winnow out the facts from all the background noise. We have widely differing views on the severity of the Covid crisis- not only from government leaders, but in the press and social media.  What the public sees are people in leadership positions- government, medical, business, finance, etc., making decisions about how to respond and react to this pandemic. A pandemic that started with one illness in the U.S. in February and has now taken it's toll in terms of lives lost or changed forever, business bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures and unemployment and food bank lines.  

These decisions and their consequences in aggregate tell us something about ourselves as a people and a country. Does it say that we missed the mark, dropped the ball, or maybe just didn’t care? 

Did our sense of morals prevent us from doing what was right?