August in Charleston witnesses the loveliest of migrations. Like the swallows of Capistrano or the butterflies of Mexico, students flock back to the city in youthful, idealistic, hedonistic, colorful displays. They build nests in the tall brick domiciles and under the roofs of slanting wooden houses.
After a skipped year, they’re coming back. This magnificent invasion ought to be a harbinger of normality. It could have been. Instead, we’re staring at calamity. In the past week, the College of Charleston went from two COVID cases to 20. And that’s before the dorms open. It’s as if we’re pouring poison in the swallows’ nests.
Gov. Henry McMaster, Attorney General Alan Wilson and the state Legislature share the blame.
Let me explain, using a comparison from my field, Irish and Irish American studies. Most everyone knows that the potato crop failed in Ireland for several years in the mid-19th century. Here in the United States, we call it the Potato Famine or the Great Famine.
A million people, most of them expelled from their thatched-roofed cabins by bailiffs, starved to death in work camps or along roads or in holes carved out of ditches. Another million made it to the docks and headed into exile, many in notorious “coffin” ships. If you have an Irish name, it’s likely you’re here because of the famine.
In Ireland, they don’t call it the Famine. They call it “An Gorta Mór,” the Great Hunger. “Famine” implies an inescapable ecological disaster. That might have been the case in the first year, when the blight took everyone by surprise. But the second year, the third and the fourth: The disaster was man-made.
Ireland had plenty of food. But Englishmen ran the country, and England’s first priority was not the welfare of the Irish people. Rich farmers and ranchers were exporting beef and grain to England. The famine was caused by the government’s response to the blight — or rather by its lack of response, by its hands-off political philosophy. Don’t interfere with anyone’s liberty. Don’t let the poor get used to handouts. Don’t mess with the economy.
Many scholars think the Great Hunger fits the U.N. definition of genocide. They argue the negligence amounted to a crime against humanity.
We don't have genocide, but in the second year of this pandemic crisis, we have negligence with deadly consequences.
Because everyone knows that the vaccines work. If everyone got vaccinated, we’d be nine-tenths the way back to normalcy. How many people have died already this summer — how many more are going to die this fall — because of this negligence? How many young college students will be haunted by “long-haul” COVID for years to come?
We can’t even attribute South Carolina's low vaccination rate to wrongheaded political philosophy. Protestations about personal “liberty” are bogus when the very same government lets us mandate shots against hepatitis, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox and pneumonia.
I can’t imagine what’s going on in the head of our governor, our attorney general and our Legislature, but I know he’s like an Englishman during the potato blight.
Well, we can decide to be quislings and appeasers, or we take a principled stand.
The Charleston County School Board did just that, defying the stupidity of the government’s promotion of mask “liberty.” The College of Charleston, somewhat shyly and certainly with less courage, followed suit — only after the S.C. Supreme Court confirmed that state law doesn't prohibit colleges from requiring masks.
That’s not enough. The real debate ought to be over vaccines. Right now, state law forbids C of C from doing what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College Health Association recommends and what more than 500 colleges and universities have already done and what everyone knows would make us much, much safer: mandate vaccines.
Indiana University got sued for it. Relying on precedent that’s more than 100 years old — in other words, as American as apple pie — the district court said, yet again, that vaccine mandates do not violate constitutionally protected liberties. The court’s decision was then validated by one of the most conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sure, we’ll be sued. And we’ll probably lose, since Indiana University had the option under state law to require vaccinations and C of C doesn't, since more than half of our lawmakers are “knuckleheads,” to quote columnist Brian Hicks. But we should try anyway.
More is to be gained by losing this fight than by avoiding it. At least we could look ourselves in the mirror without disgust.
Joseph Kelly is an English professor and director of the College of Charleston's Irish and Irish American Studies program.
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Commentary: What can the Irish Potato Famine teach us about COVID? - Charleston Post Courier
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