I'm Not a COVID Radical

Are You?

Photo by Obi - @pixel6propix on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking for a little while that I’ve been radicalized in regard to COVID. The alternative, it seemed to me, was to allow preventable mass death and disability to become normalized. In some small way I can understand how this happens. These two thoughts seem irreconcilable-

1. We can greatly reduce the number of people dying and suffering debilitating long-term effects from COVID by taking proven steps like improving indoor air quality, wearing high quality, well-fitting masks in public, and getting vaccinated to help prevent the worst outcomes of the acute phase of a COVID infection.

2. Our institutions including government and many of our neighbors, friends, loved ones, and colleagues refuse to set aside the necessary resources or take on the relatively minor inconvenience involved to bring those steps about, resulting in countless lives lost or changed forever.

There’s a high degree of cognitive dissonance necessary to maintain these two thoughts; hence the efforts to normalize the inevitable consequence of our tepid COVID response instead. Jessica Wildfire has another great post demonstrating this. She makes the case that parents have been radicalized by con artist doctors and hack journalists. She says:

Now we’re seeing an enormous surge in all kinds of diseases in children. They’re getting sick with everything. They’re winding up in the hospital. We’re running out of crucial medicines. Some children are dying, and con artist doctors are trying to blame it on lockdowns and masks, the very things they’ve been railing against for three years. They’re even blaming vaccines.

It’s deranged.

As you can see, Americans and western countries didn’t really do lockdowns. We didn’t really do masks. We didn’t really do vaccines, either. We never gave these solutions a chance.

Instead, con artists tricked us.

The public is buying it, maybe out of misplaced guilt. You don’t have to feel guilty for being misled. You just have to wise up.

Please.

The framing in this piece was helpful to me as I realized that in this case at least maybe I haven’t been radicalized; society has. This brings to mind one of Dr. King’s quotes again. Speaking at SMU on March 17, 1966 he said:

…I must honestly say there are some things in our nation and the world to which I am proud to be maladjusted and wish all men of goodwill would be maladjusted until the good society is realized.

I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to a religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, leaving millions of people smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

Our society has long been sick with segregation, discrimination, bigotry, capitalism, militarism, and violence, and Dr. King rightly saw the need to resist the temptation to accept this as “normal.” We simply must do no less in regard to a society that is now literally sick too and seems hell-bent on burning through its members like so much canon fodder in service of “the economy.” So I hope to be as “maladjusted” as Dr. King was, not just in regard to the societal ills he named but in regard to the preventable illnesses that commonsense COVID precautions could limit the spread of.

It remains true that centering the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized is protective of all. A diverse and integrated society free of bigotry and violence, and free of the violence of unmitigated consumer capitalism, is a better society for all. Likewise, a society that is safe and accessible for its disabled members is safer for everyone. And a society that prioritizes limiting the spread of a deadly, debilitating disease is one in which we can hope for some measure of proximity again. We may never be able to be near in exactly the same way that many of us were accustomed to. This is a hard truth, but that doesn’t mean we can’t experience proximity. More than a few non-Western countries, for example, have chosen to normalize masking instead of widespread death and disability. We should learn from them, while we still can.