The resistance of segments of the US population to doing what they can do to get the US to the point other countries have gotten re COVID has many sources and facets.

The set that really stand out to me are related to our time horizons. 1/

1. People were unwilling to take the threat seriously early on. We needed to lock down sooner but ppl like Cuomo didn't call for it & I also think that a lot of people with the means to lock down still wld have resisted because they couldn't take themselves out of the moment 2/

in which things still seemed somewhat normal and accept what Italy, Spain, and China had clearly shown us was coming. 3/

2. People, and, again, I mean folks with choices and not folks on the verge of food insecurity and eviction, get impatient for [restaurants, offices, sports, etc] and pretend that a flattened curve is a green light rather than a yellow light. 4/

3. People with choices cannot maintain the discipline to keep social distancing & masking for long enough, even though other countries have shown us that "long enough" isn't that long.

The amounts of time we are talking about are tiny in comparison to the amount of time we're 5/

going to endure the acute stages of this pandemic and the immense down-the-road consequences of so much death, unknown long-term COVID side effects, a wrecked economy, and a generation of children whose education has been interrupted. 6/

Are we so self-centered that we can only meet the needs of our present selves but cannot imagine our future selves - who in some ways are different people than our present selves - let alone take action to avert disaster on behalf of our future selves? 7/

These questions are some weird mashup of philosophy of the self, economics (discount rate) and sociology. I'm a political scientist so I don't expect to produce answers, at least not by myself.

But I cannot stop asking. 8/