When my twin brother and I were still quite young, we used to spend many lazy days at my grandparents’ home in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where my father had returned to complete his engineering degree following WWII at what was then the Land of Enchantment’s A&M College. Their sprawling adobe home now lies beneath Interstate 10. Hanging on the wall of the garage was a gas mask that Pappy carried back from the First World War. He saved it because it had saved him. What fascinated Richard and I were the large, weirdly oval lenses resembling the eyes of a praying mantis. We would take turns wearing it and stalk along the nearby irrigation ditch like an alien.

The mask itself provided more of a barrier than a seal against poisonous gas. Its leather straps and canvas hood offered a temporary and partial protection while a soldier ran like hell. Our grandfather suffered severe lung scarring from his time in the trenches of the War to end all Wars. Eventually, tuberculosis found its way into his lungs. Together with several hundred similarly infected troops, he was returned to the Fort Bliss Army Hospital in El Paso, Texas, to recuperate in the hopes that hot, dry, desert air could heal them. In the case of the first Miller Hudson that worked, although he remained in uniform for three years of treatments following the 1918 armistice in Europe.

Anyone who has ever served in the military understands, you surrender your civil rights to a chain of command the day you report for duty. Wearing a gas mask was a requirement for my granddad – required because it provided him the best chance of surviving. (If you think you know where I’m going with this story, stay with me for a few minutes.) Some soldiers found their masks a bulky nuisance and discarded them. Some of those were lucky enough to never be gassed. Not so, for others – but any officer who failed to assure his troops carried their masks into battle could and should have been court-martialed. Guaranteeing the safety of his men, and they were all men, is an officer’s responsibility. Why, you ask? Because the strength and safety of the unit, the platoon, the battalion relies on the compliance of every soldier.

Nature, when she arrives unannounced in the form of a plague, does not negotiate. There is no deal to be struck with a virus. There is no constitutional freedom it respects. There is no human to blame, Chinese or otherwise. There is only the opportunity to outwit COVID-19. Fortunately, the virus is stupid. It only knows how to replicate. It has no other motive – no other agenda. We should be smart enough to contain it. Many societies and their governments are currently meeting this challenge. It is embarrassing that the United States of America is failing to do so.

Our technology has delivered us into a cocooned existence where we are accustomed to the fact that, for the most part, we enjoy luxuries we don’t understand – a world of “black boxes” and mysterious processes. What is wifi and how does it work? How does 5G differ from 4G? Does it matter? Changing lanes, what is a synthetic derivative? Or, what the hell is quantitative easing at the Federal Reserve and should we care about it? We’ve cruised along without comprehending the machinery of modern life and we’ve paid a price for our ignorance. A national prosperity that was once shared is now funneled to a sliver of aristocrats while the rest of us are either too busy hanging on to our modest comforts or confronting the indignities of what is now termed “shit life.”

It is not that difficult to identify what went wrong. Pankaj Mishra writes in the London Review of Books that, “…the current regimes in the U.S. and Britain gained power by fomenting hatred of experts and expertise.” He then observes, “The blithe inaction and bumbling born of ideological vanity have resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in both countries.” While Colorado has not experienced the worst of the anti-mask disputes recorded in other states, we have all witnessed ludicrous appeals to civil rights privileges. How did we arrive at a point where a Republican governor recently had to admonish his residents that wearing a mask was not necessarily a political statement but possibly, “Just a parent with an immuno-compromised child at home.”

It was encouraging to watch Colorado’s Republican primary voters reject their revanchist right candidates in favor of moderates. Colorado will need to blaze its own path for several years. In order to restart our economy and reopen our schools we must keep this virus under control. Remaining afloat until then should be priority number one. Expect changes.