“Against Human Sacrifice: Reclaiming Self & Community Care”

“Against Human Sacrifice: Reclaiming Self & Community Care”

David Ketchum

August 8, 2020

click here to see the video

 

 

I have a difficult relationship with the term self-care. On the one hand, it’s been wonderful seeing self-care become more widely discussed and appreciated. In many cases, it’s become part of our everyday conversations with each other, and there’s more acceptance than ever that self-care is not only legitimate, it is essential to both personal and social well-being. On the other hand, self-care has become (predictably) commodified, and self-care is increasingly discussed in terms that have a price tag in time, money, and resources that (also predictably) make it mainly available to those with the privilege of financial and social stability. Self-care is also increasingly weaponized against people, such as working class folks, who are told that they need to do a better job of self-care so that they can endure what are essentially unhealthy, unjust working conditions. But the goal of self-care is NOT to become better at accommodating injustice. 

 

Self-Care in the Time of COVID-19

 

When it comes to self-care, COVID-19 has intensified both the needs and the concerns. There’s a proliferation of web pages and news programs about how self-care can help you get through the pandemic, such as these words from the Mayo Clinic: 

 

“The COVID-19 pandemic can feel overwhelming due to new information, long work hours, and caring for your family and yourself. It's important to pause for a moment and collect your thoughts, as worldwide pandemics can be taxing. Remaining calm can help. / It is normal to feel stressed or overwhelmed during uncertain times. Emotions in response to uncertainty may include anxiety, fear, anger and sadness. You also could feel helpless, discouraged and, occasionally, out of control. Physical responses may include headache, muscle tension, fatigue and sleeplessness. / Taking care of yourself is important so you are equipped to help your family through this time.” (https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/self-care-tips-during-the-covid-19-pandemic  )

 

The page goes on to list strategies for supporting your physical and mental health, symptoms to watch out for, and links to other pages, including one for helping children cope with the pandemic. 

 

And it appears that this is exactly what people are doing. Last May, the Harris Poll surveyed over 2,000 adults who reported doing many of the types of things that show up on those self-care lists: doing creative activities, praying, having meaningful conversations, using technology to stay connected in new ways, spending time outside, and eating healthy foods. But that is not all the survey revealed. It also described that, despite all the self-care, people are generally struggling with the uncertainty of living in a global pandemic. 46% said they are having difficulty maintaining “their whole health (i.e., physical, mental, and spiritual health)”. I suspect none of this will come as a surprise, but 30% reported a lack of energy, 29% were having trouble sleeping, and 29% were “exercising less”. Moreover, 45% “of all U.S. adults say they have failed to get preventive healthcare (e.g., wellness visits, standard vaccinations, screenings, etc.) during the pandemic.” (https://drwaynejonas.com/covidsurvey/ )

 

These survey results fit with the words of the Mayo Clinic, who told us that, during a global pandemic, “You also could feel helpless, discouraged and, occasionally, out of control.” What they didn’t mention is that it is reasonable to feel that way when: 

 

• The US economy “contracted at a 32.9%  annual rate” in the second quarter and the nation “is still down nearly 15 million jobs since February” (https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/30/economy/us-economy-2020-second-quarter/index.html ); 
• 40% of renters in the USA are facing eviction  (https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/07/28/report-more-than-40-of-us-renter-households-are-at-risk-of-eviction-infographic/ ); and 
• “more than 10 million Americans are expected to lose employer-sponsored health coverage between April and December 2020” (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/lost-health-insurance-coronavirus-pandemic-125934943.html ). 

 

We could also detail the unfolding impacts on disabled people, women and children, Black/Indigenous/People of Color, gender and sexuality minorities, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups, but I think the point is clear enough. Self-care advice is great, but it is insufficient. Being able to stay present with ourselves and one another, monitoring our emotional regulation, and paying attention to what supports our well-being are all wonderful and important skills. The problem with the self-care movement in the midst of a pandemic is not in providing this kind of information, and I’m glad places like the Mayo Clinic are putting it out there. No, the problem is that all of this is largely impossible for a significant number of people.

 

Heroism or Human Sacrifice? 

 

I mentioned that self-care is also being weaponized against us. In particular, people experiencing unhealthy and unsustainable circumstances are often being asked to do extra work, at their own expense of time, money, and energy, in order to accommodate those who profit from not providing humane conditions at work or in society. In this way, the powers that be encourage self-care as a way to prop up unjust systems, allowing them to survive while avoiding accountability for exploitative practices. But the pandemic is pushing even this to absurd extremes. 

 

Our Wisdom Lesson for today comes from Kim Kelly, writing in April 2020 for the Washington Post, with the headline of: 

 

“Essential workers don’t need our praise. They need our help. Calling essential workers ‘heroes’ makes it easier to pretend that they signed up to sacrifice themselves for the rest of us.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/30/essential-workers-dont-need-our-praise-they-need-our-help/ )

 

Like with so many other issues, the United States’ mishandling of the pandemic hasn’t created a new problem in this regard, but it is most certainly amplifying these problems. Our economy has a long history of mistreating and exploiting workers, with poor working conditions and poor pay leading to misery and death. COVID-19 has made it abundantly clear that this philosophy and practice has not changed. In the absence of adequate social infrastructure, we have created a situation where it is somehow considered acceptable, necessary, and even prudent to demand that a significant portion of the workforce, as Kelly put it, to “sacrifice themselves for the rest of us.” 

 

Kelly reminds us that essential workers have always been essential and that “they deserve every iota of praise, especially since so many of them are normally ignored or quietly exploited.” But she also rightly insists that -

 

“Calling them ‘heroes’ allows those of us who are, unlike them, privileged enough to remain home to imagine that these workers agreed to serve as human sacrifices, that there is an inherent nobility in the risks they’re taking. It gives us a chance to ignore the rotten, hazardous conditions that have been allowed to fester thanks to capitalist cruelty and federal malfeasance, and absolve us of any complicity. But most of these workers didn’t sign up to be first responders, and are now overwhelmed by the magnitude of what’s being asked of them. They keep telling us that they don’t want compliments, they want help, but we have continued to fail them.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/30/essential-workers-dont-need-our-praise-they-need-our-help/  ) 

 

This is a familiar refrain, and it is inexcusable that it continues to be ignored by our society. Last May, Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician and researcher in New York City, described his own experiences in the New Yorker. Even as infection rates began to slow, he noticed that essential workers were being required to “expose themselves and their families” to COVID-19 every day, and they were paying the price in higher infection rates. He wrote: 

 

“We’re now debating whether it’s safe to reopen the economy, but for essential workers it never closed. Each morning, during the apex of the deadliest pandemic in a century, these men and women have been venturing out into the epicenter of disease, to cook and clean, deliver food and carry mail, drive buses and stock shelves, patrol the streets and tend to the ill. Many have paid with their health—some with their lives. / It’s becoming clear that essential workers experience a disproportionate share of death and disease owing to covid-19. During one week not long ago, I cared for a police officer, a grocery-store clerk, and a bus driver. During another, my clinical service of fifteen patients included three food deliverymen. (The last time I can recall caring for a delivery worker was more than two years ago: his leg was broken after he was hit by an S.U.V. at a busy Manhattan intersection.)”

 

Dr. Khullar went on to point out the systemic racism at work, as 75% of New York City’s essential workers are people of color.  (https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/the-essential-workers-filling-new-yorks-coronavirus-wards )

 

The narrative about heroism and the noble sacrifice allows us to avoid this reality, to hide from the rampant racism, classism, disablism, and other oppressive systems that so deeply characterize our society. Hiding behind this image of heroism, we turn away from one another, refuse to understand what is actually happening, and comfort ourselves that all of this is somehow okay. What does – what can? - self-care mean in the context of such disparities and injustice? 

 

Who Is in the Room? 

 

From time to time, I have given workshops on this topic of reclaiming self and community care. And I begin with questions like these, to get an idea of where people are coming from. I’ll ask: 

 

·      What connotation does self-care have to you?

·      What words do you associate with self-care?

·      What are some popular strategies? 

·      Are there any patterns to these answers? 

 

And -

 

·      Why do we need self-care in the first place? 

 

The answers I get usually depend quite a bit on the people in the workshop. If it’s mainly financially stable, generally healthy, White folks in the room, the answers usually have to do with coping with stress, taking time to unwind and recharge, and being kind to oneself. All of that is great and important, and I only bring it up to put it in contrast with the answers that come up when the people in the room are poor, working class, disabled, chronically ill, or not White. Then, the answers are usually about survival, and self-care is typically a luxury with neither time nor money to afford, or energy to enjoy. 

 

Part of this is an issue of definitions. When self-care became commodified, an opportunity to make profit, our popular associations of care were largely reduced to bubble baths, spa days, and luxury resorts. Self-care became about some justifiable pampering; we needed to remember that it was okay to spend some money on ourselves and indulge in some guilty pleasures. 

 

But, with these connotations, it’s no wonder that people from oppressed communities have been largely alienated. Self-care as consumption just creates a further gulf between those who can afford to spend time, money, and energy on products and experiences, and those who cannot. The result is that self-care now has an accessibility problem, and self-care as consumption reinforces oppressive systems, especially along ability status, economic, and racial lines.

 

The commodification and weaponization of self-care work in favor of the status quo, and the status quo is a social system that relies on and perpetuates injustice. Further, people are so busy surviving that there isn’t much leftover to invest in social change. It is no accident that unhealthy, unsustainable, and unjust work and life conditions serve to both perpetuate oppressive systems and cultures AND leave those most impacted with the least access to time, resources, safety, and energy to devote to movement building.

 

From Self-Care to Dual Power

 

But the roots of self-care in social justice movements are much more liberating. As Audre Lorde taught us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” When we reclaim self and community care, we find that it is about surviving and resisting injustice, so we can stay in the fight and bring about change. Self-care is an act of defiance against a society that says we exist only to prop up unjust systems, and this defiance dares to envision a world where everyone’s well-being is important and where everyone’s needs can be met. Because, in a healthy, functioning society, self-care is integrated into its habits, relationships, organizations, and culture. You wouldn’t need anything special, except in cases of crisis, trauma, or disaster. Self-care would be the norm, and resources would be abundantly available for when those times of crisis did arise. 

 

So, with the commodification and weaponization of self-care, we’ve begun to shift our language to community care. This is meant to bring our attention back to the ways that self and community care have been, and can be, radical expressions of resistance - of our insistence to survive, persist, and organize in the face of direct, structural, and cultural violence. This reclamation can in itself be a radical act: building social capital, cultivating community, redistributing resources, modeling partnership (against domination), and making organizing more resilient, sustainable, and just.

 

And this is how I’d like to see more people re-envisioning community care, especially for those of us in positions of relative power and privilege. We can leverage the growing acceptance and popularity of the self-care movement, even one oriented around consumption, to make self-care more accessible to people who belong to marginalized and oppressed communities. Over the years, I’ve collected a few working principles for supporting this kind of shift. 

 

1. Both activism and taking a break can be expressions of self and community care, especially for people from marginalized and oppressed communities, and our strategies need to include room for both. 

 

I start here because sometimes, in our enthusiasm, we create pressures and expectations on ourselves that contribute to burnout and compassion fatigue. Sometimes, my activism is exactly what I need to help me channel my anger and feel empowered. At other times, I need to step away and process my emotions and experiences. I don’t step away often, but I might take a break more regularly if our movements were set up in a more sustainable way, so that activism included encouraging and supporting self care. 

 

2. Self-care should flow out of and embody values and aspirations.

 

Though sometimes characterized as selfish, self and community care connect us to our deepest understandings of love and justice. Identifying those needs and aspirations can bring clarity and be empowering. As we continue to build and adapt our movements for social change, we need to dream and plan: what kind of world are we creating? What will our communities look and feel like? How do we want to be treated and how will we treat others? We can design self and community care practices that move us in the direction of our dreams and begin to make those values and aspirations a reality. 

 

3. Because an unjust society profits from our lack of self-care, making us more vulnerable to exploitation, we need to integrate both accountability and support for decisions related to our well-being.

 

Especially for any of us who belong to marginalized communities, we have typically been well-trained in neglecting our own well-being. Surviving this present moment is often a more pressing task. Radical self-love and self-care need to be normalized, including both 1) the legitimacy and necessity of taking care of ourselves and 2) the methods and resources for doing so. And if you happen to have extra resources, you can contribute to this change in social norms by directly supporting marginalized communities. 

 

4. Self-care strategies should be flexible and will change over time as our circumstances and needs change. This means that reflective practices are often essential.

 

I hope that this is an obvious one. Care will look different to different people at different times. But I’ve witnessed some self-care shaming at times, and that hurts us all. Additionally, we need to remember that self-care practices are often culturally defined, so that we can treat these kinds of conversations and one another with respect. As we go along, we can learn how to best support one another to better identify our needs, so that we can each choose the self-care practices that are most likely to meet our needs in healing and empowering ways. 

 

5. We don't have to judge ourselves for using coping mechanisms that we understand are not sustainable for the long-term. However, we can become intentional about replacing strategies that are helpful in the short term but maladpative over time.

 

This is another area where there is often self-care shaming, but that ultimately undermines the whole point of self-care. I can share a more lighthearted example of this from my own life. I do not like eating donuts. I don’t generally like their taste or texture, and they are too sweet for my palate. But I often crave donuts when I am feeling exhausted and stressed out. And I don’t want just one donut; I want a dozen. And I want to eat enough in one sitting that I know I will not feel good afterwards. I don’t indulge in it very often, but I’ve done it twice already in 2020. I don’t feel guilty about the desire, and I don’t feel guilty if I indulge. I know it’s not something I want to make a habit, but sometimes it helps make the world feel better, at least for twenty minutes or so, and that can make a big difference. Ideally, I’ll manage my stress successfully so that I won’t rely on a donut binge to cope – but I’m not making any guarantees that I won’t eat another dozen before 2020 comes to an end. 

 

Obviously, there’s a balance here. We don’t want to make decisions that harm ourselves or others. But even when we feel the urge to do something that is ultimately unhealthy, we can be compassionate with ourselves, seek to understand the underlying need, and make the best choice that we are capable of making. 

 

6. Expanding our attention also bridges self-care to community care. We are building communities and movements that embody and cultivate the type of society where self and community care are available for all. 

 

Oppressive structures and cultures are the biggest barriers to self-care, and we wouldn’t need a self-care movement if we lived in a wise, compassionate, just society. The longer we are delayed in accomplishing this work, the more people will suffer. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the gaps in our support for self and community care, and that calls for creativity, persistence, and solidarity. When we advocate for hazard pay, we are supporting community care. When we demand extension of unemployment benefits, that is community care. When we insist on disability justice and accessibility during the pandemic, that is community care. When we work together, giving each other rest and sharing resources so that the work can continue, that is community care. Social justice is self and community care. 

 

 This is also how we connect self and community care with the social change practices of mutual aid and dual power, but that’s a reflection for another day.  In the meantime, we can begin by deepening our understanding of the relationship between creating communities and societies that promote and support self-care and creating communities and societies that live up to our values of equity and justice. We can commit ourselves to building that society – one that refuses to tolerate the exploitation of the earth or our fellow human beings, so that we might truly know the joy of caring for one another. 

 

“What Makes Us Human?”

“What Makes Us Human?”     August 9, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

 

Forbes March 21, 2020

Mead said that the first evidence of civilization was a 15,000 years old fractured femur found in an archaeological site. A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. This particular bone had been broken and had healed.

Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger; you cannot drink or hunt for food. Wounded in this way, you are meat for your predators. No creature survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. You are eaten first.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that another person has taken time to stay with the fallen, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended them through recovery. A healed femur indicates that someone has helped a fellow human, rather than abandoning them to save their own life.

 

The Old Testament’s primeval history, recorded in the opening chapters of Genesis, gets dark fast. Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. A serious 

Case of sibling rivalry turns into fratricide. Cain murders Abel and a very anthropomorphic character of God comes calling and asks Cain, “Where is your brother, Abel?” And Cain replies defiantly with a question that has echoed down through the centuries, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

 

I would be surprised if any sermon written on this text from the 4^th chapter of Genesis over the past 2500 years answered this question in the negative. The resounding response is so obvious that it is not even stated . . . “Yes,” “yes you are your brother’s keeper.”

 

But the language of church and synagogue are often in denial of the language in the marketplace. Seriously, to what degree is our neighbor, our sister or brother, or worse yet, the stranger on the other side of town . . . to what degree are they my problem? 

 

Especially in our post agrarian society, even more in our socially isolating, pandemic social order in which we focus on making sure that we have enough toilet paper, hand sanitizer, beef, and gasoline for ourselves before we give a moment’s thought to anyone else. Am I my brother’s keeper? To what degree are my sister’s problems also my problem? 

 

The most famous passage of scripture that isn’t in the Bible at all is, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” Especially in our American form of liberty and independence, we frequently insist upon a very strict, “I got mine” world view. We have seen this now for more than a decade of discussion about health insurance, especially in the coverage of “pre-existing” conditions. If insurance companies are legally required to cover pre-existing conditions, the healthcare costs for healthier people goes up. 

 

The debate over this part of Obama Care has pitted younger, healthier people who are often at the beginning of their career with lower wages, to help pay for the medical expenses of older and sicker people who maybe have more money. The Trump administration has filed law suits for the past three years trying to do away with mandated coverage for people with pre-existing conditions while publicly swearing that they will do whatever they can to protect this vital coverage . . . which, if you were looking for another reason to despise this president, this is a good reason. 

But in the “screw my brother and sister” category, locally, we have a classic example in Rachel Shelton who is suing the City of Springfield because of the mask requirement which she says that they do not have a right to impose on us. She explained, “Your health is not my responsibility. Your emotional well-being is not my responsibility,” Though she did cite her own claustrophobia as a reason for her lawsuit, so I guess 150,000 people are supposed to risk a lethal infection because of her emotional reaction to being asked to wear a mask over her mouth and nose. In classic white-privilege over-statement, she added in a news conference that the City Council, by asking us all to wear masks in public during a dangerous pandemic, that “they have created Nazi Germany here.” I’m sure you can all see the similarity between attempting military world domination and murdering millions of Jews, gays, gypsies, and special needs kids, and being asked to wear a mask.

 

She has set up a “go fund me” fund, asking for donations made out to her personally to help pay for her legal fight against this “Nazi” move on the part of 

the city. What galls me about her hypocrisy even more is that she claims to be a minister . . . which is why I always tell the stranger sitting next to me on a plane trip that I am a philosophy professor. 

I don’t believe we should call anyone “Karen” because it comes too close to being just another racial stereotype, besides, some people actually are named Karen and they probably want their name back but Rachel makes me understand why people came up with the term.

 

Rachel sees herself as an exemplary Christian while failing to get the answer right to one of the first questions in the Bible, “Am I my brother’s keeper.” Clearly, she doesn’t want to be. She is willing to fight for her right to be socially irresponsible and to publicly engage in depraved indifference towards her sisters and brothers, but she still wants to be the church lady. 

All of which is complicated for me by the fact that her legal counsel is our former city council member, Kristi Fulnecky, who literally embodies almost everything that generally makes people hate lawyers and right-wing Republicans. So, I don’t know about you, but I’m not donating to the legal defense fund. 

We took our wisdom lesson today from a story about the famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, 

Who told a class that the earliest sign of human civilization was tethered to the find of a human femur that had belonged to a man about 15,000 years ago. He had broken his leg and had survived long enough for it to heal. In most of nature, if you break the largest bone in your leg, you can’t run from danger, you can’t hunt, you can’t go for water, and so, in the animal kingdom, and among human ancestors prior to this, a broken femur meant that you would die. 

 

The evolutionary turn towards humanity was when tribal humans were able to move beyond the instinct to care for vulnerable babies to also apply that compassion to the sick and the elderly of their tribe. If Donald Trump had been around 15,000 years ago and saw this caveman with a broken leg, he would have said, “That’s a pre-existing condition, we don’t cover that.” Which, if Margaret Mead is correct in her anthropological assessment that caring for the man with a broken leg was a sign of humanity, not being willing to care for a man with a pre-

existing condition might therefore indicate that Trump is less than human . . . and that assumption matches previous evidence but that is not what we are here to talk about today.

 

What we are here to talk about was this crucial moment in ancient history when our pre-human ancestors stopped to consider taking on the challenge of caring about another member of the tribe who could no longer care for himself. This point of reflection when horror and fear are conquered by something else . . . when a primitive mind moves beyond sympathy, beyond empathy, to compassion . . . a level of compassion that involves willing sacrifice for another person. In fact, in this case, I can say even that this wounded individual became a “person” when someone decided that he was worth the risk, the effort, the sacrifice, to take care of him until he could walk again. 

 

It is a choice. You can see the wounded man as an “other” or as “one of us.” Maybe even see that it wouldn’t take very much of a twist of circumstances for you to be the one lying on the forest floor faced with the prospect of becoming saber-tooth food by sunset. It is in this very ancient impulse to “do unto others what you would have them to do unto you,” that we find our humanity.

 

But here is the problem: the work of evolution is never entirely finished. It is not that this cave man 15,000 years ago had a dawning realization and forever since there human civilization has been aware that we are our brother and sister’s keepers.

One moment in history we realize that we are our brother’s keeper and then, 15,000 years later, that old reptilian brain is still down there in our brain stem and we can give full throated vent to the belief that your health, your well-being, your survival is just not my problem. And I don’t mean to exploit Karen . . . I mean RACHEL here because it really isn’t just her. Some days it is all of us, and every day, it is a lot of us, who choose not to evolve, to take a giant step backwards. 

 

We have very persuasive language about it…. We need to have boundaries . … we don’t want to be enablers . . . we need to tend our own gardens . . . . you be you, I’ll be me. There is some truth behind all of that . . . but then there is this guy with a broken leg, you know, the person who lost their job, whose employer moved to China, the one who struggles with demons we cannot see but that are real to them. 

There are people who have a very high likelihood of dying from Covid-19 if they get it . . . people who need for us to wear a mask, wash our hands, keep our distance, and get a vaccine when we can.

 

How human we are is not about something that happened among our ancestors thousands of years ago. How human we are is the sum total of the choices we have made during our lives. We don’t always choose correctly. We get it right sometimes, we get it wrong sometimes, and sometimes we are just too tired to do the right thing that we know is right.

 

Still, I love this bit of wisdom from the solitude of Walden Pond: Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate himself by conscious endeavor.’

 

Mrs. Shelton, in spite of her protestations of faith, is reacting out of fear, letting her lizard brain speak before her more evolved brain gets a chance to do the right thing. And, Mrs. Fulnecky is, well, being Mrs. Fulnecky . . . her name has more than 4 letters but it is still a 4 letter word . . . but you, you are not Shelton or Fulnecky . . . about you I can say that I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a person to elevate her or himself by conscious endeavor. 

 

Covid-19 is highly infectious. It often manages to get around masks, hand sanitizer, social distancing and it may even get past the first rounds of vaccines and we can be reasonably frightened by this potentially lethal virus. But beyond that fear, this is our opportunity to evolve, to be more than what we have been, to be the heroes that the moment calls for. 

 

Compassion is the key to the spiritual life. You are the one who will not leave the guy with the broken leg to die. You are the ones with an evolved conscience. I trust you and I believe in you.

Fake News: Being Informed in an Age of Propaganda

Fake News: Being Informed in an Age of Propaganda       August 2, 2020

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

 

“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.” ~Will Rogers

 

I have never been one to wear a hat. I never thought they looked good on me, so I had all but dismissed the topic when I started to get some bad spots on my face that made my doctor insist that I start wearing a hat when I am in the sun. But you can’t really wear a straw hat in the winter time, and you can’t wear an Indian Jones fedora when you are wearing a clergy collar to a protest. So, the collection grew. But then came the pandemic, with lots of hours of looking into a computer screen, a computer screen that knows that you ordered one hat a year or two ago, and has never given up on suggesting others. You spend a lot of time alone during a pandemic. 

I don’t want to be too specific about just how many hats I have ordered during these past few months but it ended with this one. . . which both sort of rounded out the collection and made a bold statement regarding the complete irrationality that I would ever have an occasion to wear a steam punk top hat. . . unless it was right now?

 

This little hat buying jag I have been on is the result of both targeted advertising and the fact that, for reasons that are not clear even to me, I wanted to be persuaded to buy several hats. In my own defense, I have spent most of the past four months almost entirely unsupervised. Pandemic isolation starts to work on you after a while. 

That’s the real secret sauce in advertising. Commercials can make a product look glamorous, or tasty, or convince you that it is a sign of status, success, or sex appeal but they can’t make you buy it. They can just feed into the appetite that you already have and give you a clear glidepath to the cash register. 

 

The spyware on our computers, the customer information profile that Amazon and Sams builds on us and, possibly even the ever-listening home assistant devices that many insist will hear them mention products they might want, certainly helps to target advertisements to us. My FaceBook page knows to show me ads for scuba diving vacations, fountain pens, hats, and even though I have an SUV and a pickup truck, my page knows that I used to own a convertible and that I never fail to stop and look at ads for what might be my next one. 

 

Still, no matter how they may try, they cannot sell things to me that I do not want. It doesn’t matter how much they discount Arby’s, Taco Bell, tattoos, or feminine hygiene products, I’m not buying. 

 

So, when we talk about “fake news” in our day, a lot of what passes for news is fake, some of it pathetically obviously fake, and yet, what makes it believable to people is that they already want to believe it. As Fran Lebowitz so succinctly summed up the motivation of the Trump supporter: 

Trump’s very public bigotry and racism gives people permission to say and to believe things that, even five years ago, they would have been embarrassed to say out loud; but they harbored bigoted and racist feelings and now, in the time of Trump and their enablers at Fox News, they are given license to elevate Archie Bunker to the role of messiah. 

Objectively, for all of the public bloviating about it, during the entire time that

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/theres-new-wall-194-miles-border-16-miles-didnt-have-wall-before/

Trump has been in office, his administration has managed to construct only 194 miles of wall between the USA and Mexico’s 2000 mile long shared border but even that amount is inflated because all but 16 miles of it was replacement wall. And yet, Trump has recently credited his “big beautiful wall” with keeping Mexicans out of the USA and by keeping them out, he has prevented the spread of Covid 19. This is clearly not true. The addition of 16 miles of fence on a 2000-mile border is very nearly inconsequential. So, who believes this propaganda? Obviously, the only people who believe it are people who desperately want to believe it and virtually no amount of evidence could convince them otherwise. 

Religious people have known how this works for thousands of years, from a talking snake to a talking burning bush, to virgin births, walking on water, and miraculous healings we have been limbered up to believe the impossible because we want to believe it, not because it is true. There are 50,000 people right here in Springfield who would be willing to fight you over the claim that Jesus physically walked on the Sea of Galilee, which, sadly, is about the same number of people who in Springfield who believe that Trump has built hundreds of miles of wall along our border with Mexico and that somehow, Mexico paid for it, which, if it were true, would have been more of a miracle than walking on water, but it comes from the same kind of thinking. 

 

Chris Wallace recently interviewed President Trump for Fox News and I don’t know if this was just a fig leaf for Fox or if Chris Wallace was sincerely going after Trump, but there were dozens of points at which Wallace confronted Trump’s misstatements of facts. Things that are objective facts, like claiming that the USA had the lowest death rate in the world from Covid-19 infections when we are, in fact, on a per capita basis, somewhere between number 7 and number 10 in the world. And even when confronted about the facts, Trump defends himself by claiming that Fox is fake news, one of the only things I would normally agree with Trump about, but, in this interview, Wallace came armed with the facts and he was not afraid to produce them.

 

It was still a bit of a softball interview, no questions about the use of secret police in American cities or the Russian policy of paying bounties for every American soldier killed in Afghanistan. . . it wasn’t like Trump had agreed to let me ask him some questions, but, for Fox, it wasn’t a puff piece. 

 

But the current pandemic presents us with life or death issues in discerning what is reliable information and what is fake news. Right now, we are still fighting the ne mask requirements in most cities. This fight probably won’t last much longer because it is increasingly difficult to deny the obvious fact that wearing a mask slows the spread of infection . . . it doesn’t stop it entirely but it may reduce the threat of infection by more than 90% and half of that would make it worth mandating. But there are still any number of people who don’t want to wear one and, sadly, many people have turned it into a partisan issue.

 

Now that we are seeing members of the Trump administration wearing masks and, in fact, several members of the administration testing positive for the coronavirus, then it is becoming less partisan, but a lot of the crazy videos we have seen of people in grocery stores and Walmarts around the country who were throwing fits over being asked to wear a mask really boiled down to a conservative verses liberal divide. 

 

Things like science, medicine, virology, should never become Republican vs Democrat, or conservative vs liberal, but they have; and my fear is that it will extend to the next big Coronavirus hurdle, which is vaccinations.

The case for wearing masks is pretty straight forward. You are less likely to spread the virus if we avoid spitting on each other. Something that people in Asia who have lived through other infections viral diseases in recent history, now instinctively accept. But a vaccine is less easily verified visually.

 

Look, folks, we all want for this to be over. Life may never be normal, if normal means life as it was lived before the pandemic. I don’t know if we will ever go to crowded concerts or even churches ever again, but as normal as life is going to be, it is going to be accomplished when we have herd immunity. 

Now, let me drill down on this: The virus, as scary looking as it is, does not have legs, it does not have wings. The virus can only travel in the lungs of a host. Literally, you have to help to spread it or it will not spread. If everyone on earth socially isolated for 14 days in a row, it would virtually cease to exist. 

The pandemic continues only because our attempts at stay at home orders and business closings have only been partial and, in most cases, halfhearted. We are still working for the virus, carrying it to thousands of new victims every day. 

 

If this were a less lethal virus, we might reach herd immunity by just going on with our lives and letting virtually everyone become infected. When the infection rate got high enough, so that 80-90% of people had antibodies, then the spread of the virus would diminish to very low levels. But this novel virus keeps surprising us. Not only is it very lethal for certain parts of our society, but the antibodies don’t seem to hang on at any useful level very long. 

 

Sweden made a courageous attempt at just martialing forward to achieve herd immunity through infection. They told the elderly and those with underlying conditions to shelter at home, but they let everyone else just go on with work, school, and retail life. The result has been that Sweden has arrived at one the highest death rates in the world and they never reached herd immunity. Estimates are that if the USA had followed the same path, rather than having lost over 140,000 Americans, we might have had as many as 2 million fatalities.

Herd immunity happens when nearly 90% of us can no longer be infected by the virus and, the only way that is going to happen is when there is an effective vaccine AND, AND, when 90% of us have been willing to get vaccinated, and that, my friends, is our next big moral hurdle. We’re probably at least 6 months away from a vaccine being available and it could easily be much longer but, in current polling, as many as 50% of Americans are already saying that they are not going to take it. 

Just not going to take it. Mind you, with a virus like this, it isn’t just about me being protected, we need herd immunity and not just in America, we need herd immunity on all 7 continents because if we allow some poor nation to become the next hot spot, the virus will gather strength, mutate, and spread again. We need global compliance. 

 

When someone tells you that they are not going to get the shingles vaccine because they don’t believe in vaccines, you might try to reason with them, but, in the end, if they are unconvinced, just tell them to enjoy their months long experience of searing nerve pain and hope they don’t lose vision in one or both eyes but, in the case of shingles, I have my vaccine and what she does will not affect me personally. Covid-19, however, won’t work that way.

 

So why do people say that they have decided not to take the vaccine? There are a few possible reasons.

The first is, as you know, some people are crazy. . . like this lady demonstrating in front of the White House earlier this spring. They think the vaccine is a way for Bill Gates to inject them with a GPS tracking device as if Bill Gates really really wants to know which bingo hall this senior citizen goes to on Friday night. The sign she carries says “chloroquine works” which, by my count, makes her approximately the third person in the world insane enough to believe that, right after Trump and Brazil’s Bolsonaro. 

 

We could wish that this abuela was an outlier but when you consider that after all we have been through, 40% of American voters still plan to vote for Trump a second time, you see that there is a strain of irrationality within our society that, while not a majority, is a significantly large minority. 

 

Secondly, there are what we call the “anti-vaxxers” who just don’t want to inject themselves and especially not their children with unknown foreign substances. Some faction of this “crunchy granola” crowd continues to pass around the myth that vaccines cause autism, a claim which has been proven to be totally wrong in multiple studies over three decades and yet, some people are more willing to trust a rumor they got from social media than they are hard scientific research. As our friend Paul Thomlinson has said here in the past, “What do children get from vaccines? – They get immunity to polio, chicken pox, measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough – but they don’t get autism from a vaccine.”

 

And thirdly, there are those who simply do not trust anything that comes from our government anymore. I have some sympathy with them. Many black Americans refuse to trust the government with any inoculation and that is not without reason. 

Over a period of 40 years, lasting right up to when I was in high school in the 1970s, the government was secretly injecting poor black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, with syphilis to see how the disease affected them. More than 600 men were tricked into this study. This is not on some 19^thcentury slave plantation, this went on until 1972, 20 years after the Civil Rights Movement, then years after schools were integrated in Alabama. Sure, it has been a minute, but I understand if there are a lot of black people who are not ready to let their guard down.

 

Many people in the Latinx community are distrustful of government vaccination programs because, for them, the pharmaceutical testing done on women in Puerto Rico is still not a matter lost only to history and even after the tragic mishaps of testing in the 1950’s on unsuspecting women, many pharmaceutical labs have continued testing on paid “volunteers” in Puerto Rico until recently. . . because it is still legal to exploit the poor. 

 

But, hey, I’m not black and I’m not Latino but I have my trust issues when it comes to the government and not just ours. Boris Johnson told people in the United Kingdom that the Covid virus was nothing to be afraid of, until, of course, he got it. Boslonaro in Brazil told his citizens that it was just like getting a cold and chloroquine would cure it . . . I don’t wish anything bad on Brazil’s “Bozo” but if he is injured by chloroquine, I am not likely to go into mourning.

But, of course, no one can raise “stupid” to a higher standard than our own president who not only tried to dismiss the severity of the infection, and tried to sell people on taking chloroquine, but even went so far as to suggest ingesting or injecting disinfectants or trying to get intense UV light into your lungs. . . prompting many disinfectant companies to quickly put out public service announcements to tell people that following the president’s advice could cause serious illness or death.

 

So, in a way, I get it, black people, brown people, women, even white men, we all can find a very plausible reason to be suspicious of anything our government tells us that they are doing to help us because we know that they have a long history of actually coming to do something to us.

 

In these days of seriously incompetent government, and rampant fake news, when even the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are so mired in politics that you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt, we have to find a way to research, give critical analysis to what we are told, to find credible sources of medical information, and find the vaccine that you will take, if not only for yourself but for everyone else, who would like, one day, to be able to go to a movie, to a concert, to church, or a family vacation. 

 

I’ve known plenty of people who have turned wallowing in conspiracy theories into a form of entertainment. I’ve known people who believed that the government was seeding the atmosphere with mind control drugs in the chem-trail vapors left behind jets, that George W. Bush planned the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and anxiety about genetically altered foods and the motivations behind their development has turned Momma Jeans from a quirky little hippy health food store in the low rent district into a multi-location, fabulously successful exploitation of the irrational paranoia of people who didn’t do well in high school science. . . OK, OK, I’ll grant that there is reason for concern about how corporations are tampering with our food supply but since they have been putting preservatives and sugar into almost everything we eat for a hundred years, I’m just saying that your GMO concerns might not deserve to be your primary focus.

 

Still, just like listeners to talk radio learned to find being angry to be a form of entertainment 30 years ago, people who share conspiracy theories these days do so for cheap thrills and attention on social media. Knock yourselves out when it comes to “who really shot John Kennedy,” and, I’ll admit, I really don’t think that 

Jeffery Epstein committed suicide . . . what malignant narcissist every does?

 

But don’t play that game with Covid-19. Don’t repeat stupid myths about how wearing a mask is the same thing as wearing a yellow star in Nazi Germany, and don’t gin up crazy reasons to endanger everyone else by refusing to take the vaccine as soon as it is available. 

 

Look into it. You have reason to be cynical about the profit motivations of big pharma, the political motivations of our government, and the sloppy science behind a lot of media hype . . . I’ll admit, I would rather get my first vaccine from the labs at Oxford University in England that will not try to profit from it, than from any American laboratory that will. Still, I’ll take the first vaccine that is available to me that Dr. Fauci says is reliable. And yes, I know that he has not always been right and that historically, he really missed the mark on some issues, but on the whole, I believe that he and a number of other very sincere scientists are trying their best to save us from a lethal pandemic and we all need to do our part to make them successful.

 

 

We like to say that we are all in the same boat, but we are not. We are in the same storm, but we are in different boats. People who have the same income today that they had in January are not in the same boat with the 40 million people who have become unemployed. People who are comfortably living in the same house that you were living in when the pandemic began, are not in the same boat with the anticipated 15 million families who will have their home foreclosed on before the end of this year. And if you are a couple living, just the two of you, in a three or four bedroom home where you get bored and antsy waiting out the pandemic, you are not in the same boat as most immigrant families, living with three generations in a two bedroom, one bath home with a dozen people in it. Try to properly distance in that boat! And if you have health insurance and an established relationship with a trusted healthcare provider, you are not in the same boat at all as the people who are facing this coronavirus without access to medical care. 

 

For the insured, comfortably housed, who have a secure income and good healthcare to wallow in conspiracy theories or to be obstinate about either wearing a mask or getting the vaccine is a luxury that the poor and minorities cannot afford for you to claim. 

 

Besides, right now, because we have screwed up this first part of the pandemic so badly, we are not welcome to travel to Bonaire, Belize, the Bahamas, or any of the other places where my daughter and I plan to go scuba diving. 

So, I’ll listen to your theory about how the mafia orchestrated the assassination of JFK, just take the vaccine and so that Uncle Sam can let my people go!