May 2020
Intermediate to advanced
4 pages
8m
English
Leaders are using the language of war to rally people in a fight against COVID-19. That’s a problem.
“We are at war,” French President Emmanuel Macron said gravely in one of his first evening messages about COVID-19 to the citizens of the country where I live. Five times he repeated it. My family and I were just beginning to adjust to our home confinement. I had not fully registered the battle imagery before then, but it was certainly there, in reports from the Italian “front line” and regions soon “under assault.” Two weeks later, by the time U.S. President Donald Trump said that watching doctors and nurses heading to work was like seeing “military people going into ...