Everyone must occasionally wonder whether, if they'd been alive in New England in the 1690s, or the Commonwealth of Virginia circa 1840, what opinion they would have held regarding, respectively, women accused of "witchcraft" or the "peculiar institution" of chattel slavery. Once we've given ourselves the benefit of the doubt on those and similar questions, the next uncomfortable line of inquiry might relate to current practices we accept that our children, or their children, will find intolerable and shocking. It seems doubtful they'll have a lot of patience for excuses we'd offer from beyond, if we could. Ten years ago, the Washington Post, recognizing that we probably aren't made of better stuff than judges in Salem, Masssachusetts or the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, asked a group of scholars, philosophers, and public intellectuals to nominate candidates for things for which we should perform preemptive penance, before our descendants condemn us for them. Kwame Anthony Appiah submitted:
If you're willing to entertain the notion that the world is ruled by a stern justice, and are okay with ascribing the adjective "prescient" to Appiah, then it's safe to note that ten years hence life in America has taken a hard gut punch from a virus that has spread widely after incubating most easily in
- jails and prisons;
- meatpacking plants; and
- nursing homes.
Our president frequently anthropomorphizes the virus by speaking of "the invisible enemy." It seems maybe the next step in that analysis would be to allow that our weaknesses, though largely invisible to us, were spied out beforehand by this "enemy" who then targeted them for attack.
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