All Bets Are Off

All bets are off (ABAO). What does that mean? It means that we don't know what is going to happen next and we often entertain extreme policies to deal with the unknowable. 

An extreme form of ABAO is what happens during wars. We turn society upside down when confronted by a war. 

World War II drafted our young people and sent them to be killed across both oceans. Japanese people who wanted to live in America were treated as enemies and imprisoned. In the Vietnam War, I had to register for the draft as soon as I finished high school and eventually volunteered for the Air Force rather than be drafted upon graduation from college. Nevertheless I got some lovely green fatigues to wear and an all-expenses paid trip to Saigon in 1972. 

Crazy times for sure. 

As crazy as any parts of the above, is how it turned most of us into liars. Kids, their parents, their coaches, and their teachers were part of this conspiracy of the young. What did we lie about? We lied about anything that had to do with deferments from military service. Some pretended to be in college to escape the draft for a while. I asked a doctor if he thought my feet were flat enough to make me unfit for soldiering. He said no. Psychologists said many of us had mental issues. If there was a deferment or exclusion, we knew about it. 

Local areas had draft boards who decided who got chosen for the draft. Some draft boards had big quotas; others did not. We all heard the rumors about which ones were the most active. Some draft boards included family friends. Not mine!

A giant sense of unfairness lay over the land. That's what we talked about. Who was getting out? Who was getting in? How many of our friends had already died in Vietnam. 

So what? I write about all this because War is a time when ABAO. We become amoral if not immoral. We get very selfish and do and say things we would never normally do. 

I write this because Covid is like a war. The line to get a Covid shot is like the line at the draft office. Deferments in 1968 were like vaccine eligibility in 2021. Who gets the shots? There is a nice list of priorities. Those with morbidities. Then who? Old people. Healthcare providers. Teachers and so on. How many stories have you heard about people trying to falsify or exaggerate their status in one of these priority lists?  

And it is not just people trying to get permission to take the shots. How many ways has Covid and the War on Covid changed work and life? How many of you don't wear a mask or don't distance? How many are tired of the boring life of Covid and go to Florida for spring break? Or how many go to a local bar that clearly lets too many people inside? How many "work" at home and misrepresent what we are doing during the workday?

You can add to the list. The point is that Covid is like another war and like another war, ABAO. We do the best we can for ourselves and that best is often not reflective of a lifetime of moral lessons. Each of us has to decide his own behavior. But make no mistake, when war is upon us, we are challenged and Covid is no exception.