I normally don’t tell other people’s stories in my own writings as I usually try to stick to my own, but this one is different (and I have permission).
My oldest son spent the vast majority of last night in some state between weeping and wailing. I can’t blame him. He wanted to go to Target.
The reality is that for the past 18 months, the house has become a prison for him. He is one of the millions of children in the United States who are immunocompromised and we have been exceedingly leery of letting him do anything that would put him in potential contact with a virus from which it is unclear if he could recover and, later, unvaccinated folks from whom he could acquire the virus. So it has been that over the last year and a half (until we nervously let him go back to school a few weeks ago), his main source of being outside the walls of our house have largely been trips to one of his parents’ offices and staying in the car while we go to get groceries. Otherwise it is been a house that has been getting progressively smaller as the time has passed.
Pfizer logo taken from wikimedia
He was paroled briefly when he was first vaccinated earlier this year. The moment that the Pfizer vaccine was approved for teens, we made him an appointment to get him the jab and for a time, the world was somewhat more open for him. We ate outdoors at a restaurant. We went to the marina near his grandparents’ house for milkshakes. We stayed at a hotel while visiting his other grandparents, which we were also able to do. Then the prison doors shut again as we learned the term “delta variant” while watching the disease that had been skewing older and impacting more infirmed began to impact younger and younger populations as case numbers exploded, once again, and COVID breakthroughs for those vaccinated, though rare, began to happen in increasing amounts. Before he knew it he found himself, once more, looking at his four walls in which the vast majority of his social life takes place on the screen of his phone and his Nintendo Switch.
Of course, it didn’t have to be this way. We could have gotten it right.
Image taken from: https://www.futurity.org/asteroids-impact-fragmentation-1998892/shattered-glass-circle_1600/
The United States, far more than any of the other Western societies, has bought into the philosophical movement of postmodernity and the individualization that it necessarily entails. In it, if taken to its logical conclusion, there is no generally agreed upon reality. We deconstruct Truth and make our own truths (with a lower case t) and in this world, there is no final arbiter of what constitutes “facts.” Moreover, we can choose the community that most associates with our preferred version of reality. If we want to live into a world in which Bill Gates is shooting microchips into our arms, Tom Hanks is part of a cabal of powerful people who are coming to get your children and use them in furtherance of worshipping and making sacrifices to Satan, and Tony Fauci is a serial killer who is trying to reduce the population of the world by 90%, you can. As an added bonus it is likely, you can find thousands of people on the internet, politicians in seats of power, and whole media conglomerates who will support you in all those beliefs. It matters little if your beliefs defy reason and logic. In fact, they are all the more likely to gain traction if they do.
This has left our republic in a place in which large numbers of our citizens believe in things that range from fantastical to dystopian while undermining trust in the institutions that have undergirded our society since its inception and the reality is that we can’t remain in this place long-term. We simply won’t survive.
Reuters
It's safe to say that whatever sense of unity emerged in the first few weeks (and maybe months) of the pandemic has long since dissipated. While those of us not deemed essential to the functioning of society could agree to stay at home for a couple weeks (or perhaps, months) beyond that, the mystery of a disease that scientists were having to learn about on the fly, the eroding of systems that we had come to trust, and the general sense of dis-ease that inevitably accompanies illness and death was simply too much for many to handle. Further disrupted by the 2020 Presidential Election and the aftermath from that, exploded by the images of people in MAGA hats and SWAT gear kicking in the front door of the Capitol in Washington, DC, exploited by the aforementioned politicians seeking to get a jumpstart on, what are destined to be in the Trump Era, erstwhile 2024 Presidential campaigns (or whatever it is that Marjorie Taylor Green does with her time, when she’s not serving on committees), and made viscerally real by the images and videos of people storming into school board meetings throughout the country protesting mask mandates within the educational milieu, we have become a nation that has been severed largely down the middle with fellow citizens living in two very different realities. And those realities are on the brink of collision followed by total and complete annihilation.
Latest statistics from the CDC on Global COVID case.
For my and my family’s part, we live in the version of the world in which masks and vaccines are the only viable way to get past this era in the history of the world and where doctors, nurses, and medical staffs around the country are both giving everything they have and sitting on the brink of collapse. We know that hospitals are not getting more money for over reporting COVID deaths. Rather, we understand that each life lost senselessly in the midst of the pandemic is worthy of being mourned (and not mocked). More importantly, we believe that we owe it to our sister, brother, neighbor, friend, and fellow traveler on this journey to do whatever we can to keep her or him safe. It is our responsibility as members of larger communities to use whatever is at our disposal to protect the most vulnerable members of our society and world from illness and disease. And it is our faith that teaches us that we are all made in the image of God, deserving of a dignity that comes simply from being alive, and that all people are our family and should be treated as such.
Photo taken by me.
There is another world which exists concurrently with that one in which the value system is very different. In it, persons chant, “my body, my choice,” as if those bodies and choices don’t have a profound impact on the choices available to my family and our bodies (especially those of my children). They declare the vast, vast, vast majority of the medical community to be wrong about the cause, treatment, and cure of diseases while sharing (and re-sharing) some guy on YouTube who has discovered something that literally every other medical professional in the world just must have missed. They jump from hydroxychloroquine, to chloroquine phosphate, to bleach, to ivermectin, to whatever will inevitably come next in order to avoid taking the vaccine. Or responsibility. They ignore the voices of those who have ended up dying from the disease as they recant their faith in alternate treatments and beg anyone with ears to hear to get the vaccine. They declare COVID-19 to be a “plandemic” or hoax or vehicle for population control or a way to move Americans to be more compliant with the government. It is truly a dark and terrifying world that a great many must live in but it doesn’t even touch the surface of reality. And, in turn, it is making my son’s life a living hell.
One of the most popular stanzas in the hymnal of American exceptionalism, declares that freedom is not free. By this, we a reminded that the freedoms that we enjoy as a nation are made possible by the sacrifice of women and men in uniform who place themselves in harms way to defend the nation against all would-be attackers. It is the near constant reminder that ours is an existence of shared oblation—often for folks we don’t even know and will never meet. Lamentably, that understanding of sacrifice has been largely abandoned in the midst of this disease. “Freedom isn’t free” has been replaced with every person for themselves and it is eroding the foundations of our society while making us selfish, mean, and hateful.
A quick trip to TikTok or the YouTube combined with a few words typed into a search bar will reveal a panoply of town halls, school board meetings, protests, and public outbursts of people deriding the use of masks, the evil nature of the vaccines complete with claims of becoming magnetic and lighting up lightbulbs, and the Nazi-like secret plan to wipe out the global population. Those who speak in favor of these things are often mocked and derided (including a young man who was speaking about the death of his grandmother to COVID earlier this week). People are spat and coughed on. Elderly members of our society are accosted in parking lots.
At the same time, the online world has become a breeding ground for the most outrageous claims imaginable with whole songs, memes, and gifs dedicated to supporting these bogus claims. Comment sections of news sites have been choked out by those claiming to speak with authority and attacking those with divergent viewpoints. (If you need to see an example of this, please see the Facebook page for al.com and find any article related to COVID.) We have fully entered into the time of monsters and those of us living in the real world continue to be haunted by them and it’s unclear if or when we will be able to fight back.
My son cried last night and the reality is that there is no way for him to conclude anything other than a whole lot of people in this nation simply don’t give a damn about his wellbeing or that of the millions of children like him. I don’t know what to tell him to help him not be cynical and bitter nor do I think I should. He’s right. The decisions being made by those who believe that there is no cost to their actions have left people like him to bear the consequences and the scars that those consequences have left on his psyche will not heal in 100 lifetimes. In the United States, we remain in a state of paralysis while many of the developed nations of the world have banded together to move to a new phase in dealing with the pandemic. Freedom is not free, not in the United States and not, incidentally, in Christ, who a great number of these folks ostensibly worship and follow, and those who are pretending that it is are both passing the buck (and the bill) on to those of us who are trying our level best to live in a manner that cares for and values those who cannot care for themselves while embracing a toxic theology in which there are no expectations of a life lived in the Spirit. Whether we like it or not, we all live in a web of relationally and are aligned in a common destiny. The longer we ignore that truth the worse the outcomes will be. Anyone who doesn’t see that is not living in the real world all the while turning it into hell.
Please stop.