Like a Deer in Headlights

There’s far too much reward in our system for inaction.

In the summer of 2018 twelve boys and their soccer coach got caught in a cave in Thailand. Everybody followed it at the time. They’d walked in after practice, the monsoon rains followed, coming in early than predicted. The rising water cut them off two and a half miles inside a mountain.

It was nine days before they were found. Until then nobody knew if they were alive or dead. Divers found all thirteen sitting on a ledge in the dark, and then came the harder problem, which was getting them out. Now, it may sound simple. You just give the boys scuba equipment, and they swim out, but that simply wasn’t possible. Of all the things that people debated when it came to solutions, there was 100% certainty that they were going to be incapable of swimming out.

The dive, in or out, was hours long through pitch black passages so tight the rescue divers had to pull their tanks off to fit, and these were kids who’d never worn a scuba mask. Zero diving experience. To give you an idea of how dangerous this dive was, ultimately two Thai Navy SEALs died: one while they were diving and the other from complications.

The water didn’t care. It was rising and the air on that ledge was running out.

The governor running that operation and the government of Thailand made a decision to do something that was considered extremely controversial, unethical, even illegal. They sedated those boys, strapped each one to a diver, and swam them out unconscious through the flooded dark, for maybe a fifty percent chance of saving them.

In retrospect it seems obvious that was the decision to make. It’s not controversial after the fact. All thirteen boys came out alive. Good call.

The outcome makes it seem noncontroversial. But the decision itself was brutal. You’re flipping a coin. A thirty to fifty percent chance some or all the boys die trying to save them, versus a hundred percent chance they all die if you do nothing.

I know it seems like an obvious choice. The problem is it’s not. Taking risks is never, ever easy, even when the math is that clear. And too often, people, families, alcoholics, and entire societies wait until they’re near a hundred percent chance of failure before they’ll take the steps necessary for recovery.

I tell this story because it reminds of where we are as a country. You can see it damn near everywhere. Our health care system. Our industrial capacity, our democracy. Our ability to generate power, to have control over our own lives and bodies, to participate in our economy on fair terms. Our ability to provide safe communities without death and carnage.

I zoom in on health care a lot because it so emblematic of the other crises. The system is obviously dysfunctional. It’s massively unaffordable, and it’s clearly unsustainable. There is a cliff, a point at which it will no longer be possible to even pretend that we have a functional healthcare system, and yet we persisted

Anytime somebody brings up Medicare for All or a national health system, you know what you’ll hear. How are we gonna pay for it? How can we afford this? Everybody with their hair on fucking fire, all over TV, all over radio, because that becomes the narrative. How in the hell are we gonna pay for it????

The system we have right now, the one that doesn’t cover everyone. The one that leaves eighty percent of our counties in health care deserts and delivers some of the worst life expectancy, infant mortality, and maternal mortality numbers in the developed world. Is the most expensive on the planet projected to cost us more than $72T-trillion dollars over the next ten years. Seventy-two trillion. And nobody’s hair is on fire. Nobody is on TV demanding to know how we’re gonna pay for that.

So that tells you something. The fear was never about the money. The fear is about the change. The fear is the risk of doing something different, something bold enough to have a chance of saving us. If we put the government back in the business of owning hospitals, if we get rid of the insurance companies, then what happens to the insurance workers? How will it work? We know the system is fundamentally broken. We know it doesn’t work for us. But the fear of doing something else is so strong that we’re stuck in place.

And it’s not just health care. You hear everybody freak out when the DSA folks say defund the police or abolish ICE or abolish prisons. I think those are stupid slogans, just from a communication standpoint. But look at what we’re doing instead.

I live in Lenoir City, Tennessee, a little bitty town in the Appalachian foothills, and this fucking place has a police force armed with AR-15s and an armored personnel carrier and all kinds of shit, like we’re getting ready for a ground invasion from the Chinese. What we don’t have is well funded schools, ones where kids can play sports. It costs thousands of dollars for a kid to play in a sporting club here. Thousands of dollars. We don’t have ways to make sure people are housed and healthy.

And we know there are ways to reduce crime and make communities safer, and it turns out it’s not more policing and more armaments and more violence from our state. It’s more joy. More opportunity. More happiness, more pleasure. Kids with something to do and families that are okay.

But that idea is scary, because we think we have to approach fear with fear. We believe the only way to keep the thing we’re afraid of at bay is to make it more afraid of us than we are of it.

That’s the hundred percent option. That’s sitting in the cave while the water comes up because the swim out is risky. In Thailand they had the nerve to flip the coin, and every one of those boys is alive today, and now the whole world calls it obvious. It’ll be obvious what we should’ve done, too. It always is, after.

Corbin Trent