Graphs showing rising morbidity and mortality, or illness and death, which follow these decisions complicate common assumptions about injury or death. We usually define mortality as linked to biology, genetics, fate, accident, or illness. Or we think about death from unwanted intruders, pathogens that invade through the water or the air. Yet the kinds of data I’ve tracked in this book raise the specter that American human frailty is in part man-made, rendered all the more tenuous not by invasions of them, the immigrants or pathogens, but by political choices made by us, the white electorate.
