Six months ago, I tried to write something about the Capitol Riot. The simmering fear that I’d been feeling, that I might have to walk away from my understaffed team in an act of civil disobedience if the election results weren’t certified, had boiled over into some concoction of anger, sadness, confusion, and worry about the future of our country. I was exhausted from work, but every chance I had, I wrote. Some of the words came out like journal entries. Some were well thought out prose. Some sections were reflections on the essays and podcasts and articles I was reading, trying to make sense of everything. Literally everything. Reading through the draft now is unsettling. Because I have no more answers now than I did six months ago and the scope of the problem, its layers, its complexity, feels overwhelming. The same urge I had in January returned: if I could just finish this blog post, everything would be okay.
I started by empathizing with some of the rioters, wondering how easy it would be to radicalize me. I celebrated the victories of Senators Warnock and Ossoff and explored the decades long dedicated community effort it took to achieve that win in Georgia. I veered off on a tangent to contemplate an excerpt from Barack Obama’s presidential memoir where he doubles down on his feeling that civic engagement is good, even if it’s the kind of whipped up frenzy that stifles the reform you believe in. I returned time and time again to my deep seated rage, its roots in the 2016 election, how good it felt, how useless it often was, how eagerly I would trade grief for anger at every opportunity. I spent several hours reading and dissecting an esoteric academic article about the long and tangled history of race, class, politics, and corporate profits in this country. I reflected on my Nonna’s warnings about Mussolini. I delved into the need for election reform, despite this past election being just as if not more secure than every other before it. I let the narrative dissolve into stand alone paragraphs, random thoughts, and links to articles.
Despite its obvious hopelessness, I still tried one last time to smush something together that made sense. But it wouldn’t work. I could not finish the piece. In some ways, the distance from the turmoil made it easier to accept the essay as unfinished. But that ease was disconcerting. Just because our political strife has dropped just below the surface, doesn’t mean it has gone away. Am I so naive as to think that the successful ousting of Donald Trump is enough to cure our 400 year old problems? Am I so lulled by the relative calm to think that bland Joe Biden can fix these problems either? Am I so numb to these problems that I will accept apathy and leave work unfinished? Of course not.
But I am going to let go. I’m going to let go of some of that anger, not all of it, but some of it, and let curiosity, energy, and a little sadness take its place. I’m going to let go of the blog post, the black hole that all of my thoughts spiraled into, and start to focus in again on the smaller solvable problems that my community and my patients face on a day to day basis. And I’m going to let go of the despair and division that still clings to those larger problems and let a little hope find its way in.
For example, while the pandemic is not over, I’m letting go of mask wearing. I was apprehensive about the CDC advice last month because I did not trust people. I didn’t trust that they would wear a mask if they chose to be unvaccinated in public and I didn’t trust that this recommendation would incentivize vaccination. I was willing to continue wearing a mask, for the greater good, if that was to be the case.
Over the last 15 months, the battle between doing everything as safely as possible and doing nothing that would inconvenience people grew ugly. Most folks settled comfortably in one extreme. Wearing a mask and standing six feet from someone else became a symbolic gesture of goodwill, of belief in the pandemic as a problem, of caring about other people, and eventually of who you were going to be voting for in the election. Likewise, refusing to vaccinate yourself has become a political act expressing your independence and freedom.
But there are two happy facts. First, the CDC announcement did incentivize people to get the vaccine and second, the vaccines do work really well. So well that adding a mask on top of them adds minimal additional benefit. So if taking off your mask convinces more people to get the vaccine and the vaccine works so well that a mask only helps in large mixed gatherings, why should we wear one on a day to day basis? So I know who my political allies are at the grocery store?
Our political identities have become our primary identities recently. We use them, or what we assume them to be, to draw conclusions about one another’s character, beliefs, moral compass, or lack thereof. Sometimes, this is fair. Our misguided beliefs and incorrect decisions can hurt people and blindly tolerating that in a quest for unity is also misguided. However, we are all better than the worst thing we’ve done or thought or said and recognizing that there is more to most people than their MAGA hat or mask feels like a step in the right direction. The key will be finding a way to thoughtfully engage with people with whom you disagree, without ignoring their problematic choices and without writing them off as stupid or evil. I’m not going to let go of that.
Nobody asked me... 