The pandemic, and the response in some quarters, befuddles us. And the tide seems to be turning among the vaccinated. Bafflement is transmuting to impatience, with anger on the horizon.
Part of the bafflement comes from an almost religious belief, common to humanity, that goes against the massive weight of historical evidence.
We hate injustice. But we want to think the best of ourselves and, by extention, those we recognize as being like us. So we assign injustice to a sort of time and distance machine.
Gangs of New York, the more-or-less accurate rendition of urban hatred during the Civil War era, required Daniel Day-Lewis to chew up the scenery as the menacingly ethnocentric, racist Bill the Butcher. Particularly horrifying was the near-final scene of slaughter as rival gangs fight, joined only in their hatred of black residents.
The lynchings are one of many scenes of horror, but are especially ghastly because of their recognizable echo into more modern times. The rest of the unending brutality reminds us of how we justify hatred of those we consider too different from ourselves.
And we do need those justifications.
We hesitate to apply harsh judgments to those we recognize from everyday life. Many of us seek by habit some empathy with those we oppose. We try to apply principle, even when we suspect crass calculation or worse.
Examples of evil, or unbelievable selfishness, or astonishing stupidity make us aware that human depravity has no apparent lower limit. Rock bottom turns out to have a cellar. But we regard the worst of the worst as the lowest exceptions, exceptions that do not include us or those we know, those like us.
Humans hate unfairness. It seems baked into our DNA. When unmistakable evidence develops and injustice is more common than we like, we are driven to react. We either try to rationalize – the victims had it coming, they are not really as human, they are diseased – or we get angry about the injustice. Sometimes we are even moved to demand change.
Occasionally, that DNA seems far from universal or even as widely inherited as we imagined.
We can, and do, dismiss the odd aberration. After all, racism ended with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, or with Civil Rights laws in 1964 or 1966.
Or injustice is the exception that, by contrast, comforts us that the rule of fairness stands. We are okay. Our neighbors are okay.
A bystander was recently credited with saving the life of a motorist who had suffered a sudden seizure. The car had rolled off the side of the road onto a lawn, and the rescuer, while saving the motorist, had to deal with the homeowner. “Get off our lawn,” the homeowner supposedly screamed. “Get the man out of here, have him die somewhere else.”
We read and shake our heads at the morbid selfishness of a vanishingly few of our fellow citizens.
The exceptions among us.
In Pennsylvania, a Republican candidate for governor insists he did not cause a fatal accident involving a motorcyclist. There is trouble in one reported detail: that he was seen traveling for several miles down the highway with the motorcycle attached to the grill of his car.
In our hearts, we know we would have stopped, perhaps to save a life, or at least to confirm a death. And we know, deep down, that our fellow citizens, those we encounter in everyday life, would be as responsible.
In recent years, we have watched those fellow citizens adopt opinions that appear to have a common thread of nothing more than cruelty.
Conservative politicians, those who survive in office, seem to range from true believers, the cruelest of the cruel, to those who just want to stay in office, fake it til you make it.
The result of the simulation is the same as the real deal. It parallels a parental bully beating a small kid just to show a ex-spouse who is boss.
Bleeding hearts like immigrants?
We will put children in cages, especially those of brown skin coming from points south.
Do they want us to tolerate a different sexual orientation?
We will stamp them out.
Racial disparities in voting?
More obstacles are needed. Keep elections pure.
Climate?
Come on. It snowed in my neighborhood just last year.
And then there is COVID.
That last takes us on different turn.
We read about, and occasionally watch, as conservative lawmakers and their partners in right-of-center media are just now beginning to waffle.
The vaccinated are told they are still vulnerable. They can be guaranteed only the escape from COVID hospitalization or COVID death. Still, even a few days of flu-like symptoms, unnecessary sickness, is enough to take many of us out of the realm of empathetic understanding.
The tide is turning. The vaccinated majority is becoming less willing to tolerate the risks and the possibility of renewed restrictions. After all, the honor system does not seem to work.
The shift among a few politicians is notable. A conservative legislator here, a Republican governor there, insist that the unvaccinated are making unintelligent choices after all, choices that burden us all.
We have to be grateful for every additional public message urging rationality. But there does lurk for some of us, the clear and distinct memory of where leadership has led before that road, as the Bible says, was made straight.
As tolerance wears thin, so does our ability to put aside what we would otherwise see as isolated incidents. The Pennsylvania politician traveling the highway, the motorcycle of the now dead victim on his grill, seems less an exception to a comfortable faith in each other.
To be fair, a few Republican politicians really are beginning to urge vaccinations. Yet cynicism is forced on us, against our will. We are already on guard, skeptical in advance about future claims that they did not start the resurgence of COVID variants. They just continued to drive for mile after mile with a growing number of COVID victims on their grill until they were forced to slow.
We have to suspect, in their newfound sense of responsibility, in the urging of the unvaccinated to obtain practical immunity, if not entirely from COVID then from its more serious result – a change in residence to the hospital or the morgue – something more base than an honest concern for the health and well being of fellow humans.
In our weary cynicism we wonder at the real motivations of Republican leaders. Do they, at long last, realize that it will mostly be their own rabid supporters who are at risk? Who will endure most of the suffering. Who will do the dying?
Is their epiphany confined to how those deaths will translate in successive Novembers?
One scripted lament seems to echo as conservative pundits, vaccinated all, and their conservative fellows in legislative office begin to broadcast the virtues of immunity. Maybe it’s time to think about getting vaccinated, a growing number cautiously advise.
We are grateful. And we are forced, against our will, to think of motives.
Toward the end of Gangs of New York, Civil War riots finally end. A machine politician mourns the massive bloodshed as he views bodies of his constituents in endless rows.
We’re burying a lot of votes here tonight, he says.
