The Antidote To Climate Dread

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the constant, dire news of record-breaking heat, fires and floods, here’s what you can do, according to climate scientists.

Photo by Yuvraj Salam on Pexels.com

Written by Sarah Ruiz Grossman and published in Huffington Post 8/25/21 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-change-crisis-dread-fatigue-action_n_61268ecde4b0f562f3d9f07b

The reality of the climate crisis is dire — and it can be overwhelming.

In the past month alone, we’ve seen the hottest July ever recorded on the planet (again), the largest ever single wildfire in California history (again, just a year after the last one), and deadly floods devastating the Southern U.S. (again).

The United Nations’ recent climate report repeated what similar reports have been saying for years, with even greater certainty: Humans are the “unequivocal” cause of climate change, and the window to avoid catastrophic living conditions worldwide due to global warming is rapidly closing.

There have long been concerns in the climate science community about possible public “fatigue” at being bombarded with dire news of the worsening climate, and having this lead to widespread dread or overwhelm, which can create an emotional barrier to actually taking action.

But various climate scientists, speaking to HuffPost, rejected the idea that people are tired of too much bad climate news. If anything, they see progress in the ever-growing share of Americans who recognize climate change as a serious issue: A majority of the country, or 6 in 10 people as of a 2020 Pew Research survey, say global climate change is a “major threat” to the country, up from 44% in 2009. We need more coverage of the climate crisis, scientists said, not less.

Still, the experts recognized that for those paying close attention to the crisis, particularly people living in communities directly affected by fires, storms and floods, it can be exhausting.

“I get the fatigue and the climate grief,” said Astrid Caldas, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “What kind of world are we leaving for the next generation?”

For climate scientists themselves, who have been sounding the alarm on this for decades, much of their own “fatigue” comes from what they see as a lack of sufficient action from political and corporate leaders, who have the power to implement the large-scale solutions needed to avert the worst.

“I am ‘report fatigued.’ We need action,” Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia’s atmospheric sciences program, wrote at Forbes this month. He called for more planning from local and federal governments for a transition to “a renewable energy economy,” and urged leaders to “address the disproportionate burden” of climate disasters on “vulnerable, poor, and marginalized populations.”

The experts HuffPost spoke to all had the same antidote to climate dread: Take action. The climate crisis is urgent, the changes needed are at a massive scale, but it doesn’t mean individuals can’t make a difference. 

“We are now in an all-hands-on-deck moment,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s program on climate change communication. “We need everybody doing everything they can, at the individual level, community level, national government and business level. This is all of society.”

DAVID MCNEW VIA GETTY IMAGESA wildfire approaches homes on Aug. 24 in Wofford Heights, California.

For scientists tasked with communicating to the public the urgency of the climate crisis and what needs to be done, part of the challenge is the wide range of people’s understanding of just how bad the situation is.

Americans are deeply politically divided on climate change. About 72% of Democrats say human activity is contributing “a great deal” to climate change, versus just 22% of Republicans, according to Pew. A vast majority of Democrats say climate change is impacting their local community (83%), while less than half of Republicans do (37%). And while 89% of Democrats think the government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change, only 35% of Republicans think so.

There is another way to slice up the country when it comes to environmental issues, per Leiserowitz’s team at Yale: the “six Americas.” Through dozens of national surveys in the U.S. over years, the researchers identified six separate audiences who approach the climate crisis from different vantage points. These groups include the “alarmed” (around 26% of the U.S. in 2020 — encouragingly, up from 11% in 2014), who know that the crisis is happening, it’s human-caused and it’s urgent; the “concerned” (28% of the population), who know the crisis is human-caused, but think of its effects as more distant in time and place; the “doubtful” (12%), who aren’t sure if climate change is real, but think that if it is, it likely has little to do with human action; and the “dismissive” (at an all-time low of 7%), many of whom believe climate change isn’t happening at all.

When it comes to spurring action, Leiserowitz emphasized the need to “meet people where they are” in crafting messages that can get through to people all along the spectrum of climate understanding. 

One of the most significant factors in determining people’s level of concern about climate change, experts said, is whether they live in front-line communities experiencing the devastating effects of the crisis year after year, such as high heat, deadly fires or devastating storms and floods. 

And those communities most vulnerable to climate change — including those experiencing slower recoveries in the aftermath of climate disasters — are disproportionately poor, Black and Latinx.

“When you see your family members die, your house washing out from under your feet, when your fishing grounds are not productive, plants are dying around you — and the root of that is climate change — it is personal,” said Isabel Rivera-Collazo, an assistant professor on human adaptation to climate change at the University of California, San Diego, who works with coastal communities in northern Puerto Rico. 

There is “serious mental health fatigue” for people in communities directly affected by climate change, Rivera-Collazo said. After Hurricane Maria in 2017, which killed thousands of Puerto Ricans and left hundreds of thousands without power for months, there was an increase in suicides.

Mourners carry the casket of Wilfredo Torres Rivera, 58, who died Oct. 13, 2017, after jumping off a bridge three weeks after Hurricane Maria, in Utuado, Puerto Rico.

For the scientists studying climate change, too, there is exhaustion in repeating the same message for years and not seeing an adequate response from corporations or government.

“All of us in the expert community know we should have acted 40 years ago, and the window is closing … At some point, you cross important thresholds and everything we’re experiencing now gets much, much worse,” Leiserowitz said. “So in the climate expertise community, of course we’re frustrated. We’ve been saying, ‘World, you need to take this seriously.’ … We’re all frustrated with the fact that the message hasn’t gotten through enough to drive the kind of action that is required.”   

Rivera-Collazo pointed to the “burnout” she and other researchers feel from working with front-line communities and seeing the increased damage to those communities over time.

“I personally receive hundreds of phone calls asking me to do something, and I feel powerless. Apart from doing my research, how much more can I do?” Rivera-Collazo said, noting she goes to therapy to help with the mental health effects of her work. “I don’t have an answer to how to mitigate coastal erosion and the loss of biodiversity. There are small things we can do, but governments and corporations have much more power than single researchers and individual communities.”

Rivera-Collazo said she’s “particularly worried” for young people who may feel “despair” or feel “powerless” thinking that climate action is “not realistic,” given the relatively small impact of the individual decisions they can make — buying local goods, eating less meat, turning lights off, recycling — versus big corporations’ large-scale damage to the environment.

But Leiserowitz warned against such nihilism, saying individual action and systemic change go hand in hand. “You need both,” he said. “It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.”

“I can’t build a private bullet train from New York to L.A., so yes, we do need systems change to ultimately solve this,” Leiserowitz said. “But how do you get to systems change? We live in democracies. You get big systems change if the public is demanding action. It’s public and political will.” 

He added that the world has “everything we need” right now to combat the climate crisis in terms of technology, policy ideas and money.

“We’re just missing the demand for those solutions,” Leiserowitz said. “Public and political will: That’s the missing ingredient.”

When you see your family members die, your house washing out from under your feet, when your fishing grounds are not productive, plants are dying around you — and the root of that is climate change — it is personal. Isabel Rivera-Collazo, assistant professor, University of California, San Diego.

Even so, knowing what to do as an individual in the face of a massive climate crisis is not so straightforward. Even among the most “alarmed” on Yale’s scale of “six Americas,” many still don’t know what they, or society, can do to address climate change effectively.

Climate experts shared some ideas for simple steps you can take now to get more engaged:

Join a group. 

Conservation psychologist Susan Clayton suggested finding a group to join — or creating one of your own — whether its purpose is discussion, activism or community.

“Everyone thinks, what can an individual do? But think of a vote. Does a single vote make a difference in an election? Almost never. But I am committed to vote,” Clayton said. “My single action may not make a difference on climate change, but it’s a way of participating in a collective battle to deal with this crisis.”

Make your household greener. 

Leiserowitz noted that people’s individual decisions in their homes, when multiplied by millions of households, can make the difference in transitioning from an economy dependent on harmful fossil fuels to one that relies on much more eco-friendly renewable energy.

He suggested choosing electric cars over gas-run vehicles, replacing gas-burning stoves and furnaces with heat pumps, buying clean energy from your power company and putting solar panels on your roof. 

“To achieve the big change we need, you need to engage the decisions of billions of people,” he said.

Care for your local beaches and parks. 

In the communities in Puerto Rico that Rivera-Collazo works with, residents who’ve seen coastal erosion and the effects of storms on their beaches have been leading activities to stimulate biodiversity and reduce pollution, including reforesting an area damaged by Hurricane Maria and doing beach cleanups.

“Each time, we collect less and less trash, because of engagement with users of the beach,” she said. “One community member said for her it’s the most important. She feels she’s doing something.”

Rivera-Collazo noted that climate change is “larger than a single community on a three-mile stretch of coast,” but “once people feel ownership, they can push back on larger causes: governments, industry.”

communication

Take action, even if you can’t see the effects of the climate crisis in your local community — yet. 

Robert Bullard, a longtime environmental justice researcher and professor of environmental policy at Texas Southern University in Houston, noted that “Black and brown, lower-income communities” are often the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and have the fewest resources to recover after disasters.

In Houston, the same communities that were still recovering from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 were hit again by devastating floods in subsequent years and a major winter storm this February. That unusual storm caused widespread power outages, leaving some people freezing in prisons without running water and other people with spikes in their energy bills. “It’s one after the other,” Bullard said.

Rivera-Collazo also noted that “many of these communities carrying the burden of climate change are suffering other things,” including poverty and gentrification.

“When we say ‘what can we do’ to invite people to do more, remember some people cannot do more,” she said. “Others have to do more.”  

Rivera-Collazo walks her students through an exercise to engage them on climate change, urging them to think of the basic things they consider necessary for “living well” in their daily lives.

“Start thinking about how those privileges you are currently enjoying, when they get impacted — not if, when — what are you going to do?” she said. She asks students to consider where their food, water and electricity come from.

“If you feel safe, if you feel distant, it means you’re not aware of your vulnerabilities,” she said. “Climate change is so big, everyone is being threatened.”

Don’t forget: There’s hope.

All of the scientists HuffPost spoke to said that the key to stopping dread and starting to take action on climate change is knowing there is hope. The worst can still be averted.

Leiserowitz noted that the U.S. is already “well into the transition” from fossil fuels to clean energy.

“Good news ― wind and solar are cheaper than fossil fuels in most parts of the world today,” he said. “This is where the future is going. The question is, will we make that transition fast enough?”

For Rivera-Collazo, hope comes from seeing front-line communities “not just sitting back and crying,” but taking it into their own hands to clean and replenish local coastlines. “They are doing things. That for me is a source of hope,” she said. “People are not sitting back and waiting for somebody to come save them.”

Bullard, who is 74, locates his hope in young people “beginning to flex their political muscle, voting and getting into policy positions,” and particularly youth who are “demanding transformative change rather than incremental baby steps.”

And Caldas, from the Union of Concerned Scientists, had a message for the not-so-young: “The youth fighting so hard … At one moment or another, their parents’ generation is going to wake up to the fact that their kids are fighting for a mess they are making, and they should get engaged.”

Mommy, Are We There Yet?

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Developing Patience

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect
before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

~John Quincy Adams~

Signs of Impatience

Do you remember hearing this plaintive question from the back seat or recall voicing it yourself? The words are quite familiar and express the boredom of a child waiting to get somewhere so the fun can begin. How often do you feel bored? How did you get that way?

Boredom is defined as “the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest.” If you think about it, you weren’t born bored. Did you ever notice how curious babies are about every sight, sound and movement in their vicinity? Nothing escapes their attention. As children get older and start to walk, their curiosity increases. If children are encouraged to continue exploring the wonders of their world, they remain curious and fascinated. If they are discouraged from exploring, they might end up feeling bored.

As adults, we may become “weary and restless.” Our lack of interest in our surroundings may come from discouragement of our explorations. We may be told to concentrate on our work rather than wasting our time with foolishness. Poetry, fiction or music may be seen as distracting us from our real studies or from work.

Priorities

We may place a high priority on financial success, accomplishment or acceptance by others. We may be so busy keeping our shoulder to the wheel, our ear to the ground and our nose to the grindstone that we miss the wonders of the world around us or inside us.

We may become so preoccupied with the world’s troubles that we spend most of our time fretting about what the world has come to. There is no time left to enjoy ourselves. If we are bored, we have missed something and are not open to the opportunities along our way.

Coming to Our Senses

What can we do about it?  The first step is to realize that we have become lost. Maybe we have forgotten, or never learned, why we are on earth at all. I have asked many people why they are here. Some people are quite clear on their mission in life, while others have no idea. In my experience, it is only the second group which tends to become bored.

If you have a purpose in life, it is hard to get bored. However if your purpose is material, it is easy to become exhausted. Consider two examples. One person has a goal of earning as much money as possible. This is an endless goal which never leads to a feeling of satisfaction. Another person has a goal of using God’s gifts to make their own and other people’s lives a little better each day. Following this goal and being successful with it allows the second person to sleep easily each night and wake up refreshed.

Goals

What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish in your lifetime? What do you want to accomplish today? Having worthwhile goals and pursuing them the best you can each day is invigorating and helps you start again tomorrow. If you can’t identify any worthwhile goals for your life, think of some which can give you a focus. It’s hard to be bored when you have found your own gifts and share them with others.

Action Steps

• When was the last time you approached your day with a sense of adventure?
• What did this curiosity feel like?
• Do you sometimes miss moments because you’re busy looking forward to the next one?
• Do you live in the past, future or present?
• What can you do with the moment you are living in right now?

Selection from my book Navigating Life: Commonsense Reflections for the Voyage

Dialogue with an Antimasker

What I learned from an unlikely friendship with an anti-masker

Written by Anand Pandian and published in the Guardian 8/19/2021

Photo by Odonata Wellnesscenter on Pexels.com

Frank’s views were disturbing, a brazen assertion of white privilege. But with our fates more clearly tied together than ever, I needed to understand him.

On 11 March 2021, I took a selfie at the Baltimore Convention Center and pressed send. I’d just received my first dose of a Covid vaccine. “Feels pretty momentous,” I texted an acquaintance. “It was exactly one year ago that our university shut down.” Frank wrote back immediately from his small town in southern Michigan. “Momentous, yes. But not for the reasons you subscribe to,” he wrote.

Frank and I met in 2017 when I began pursuing fieldwork, as an anthropologist, in American conservative circles. I’ve been to his town in Michigan, he’s visited me in Baltimore, we’ve exchanged hundreds of texts – both reflective and combative – over the years.

For me, the vaccine promised freedom from worry, a way to avoid endangering myself and everyone I encountered. For Frank, it meant something else: “compliance, control and capitulation”. He singled out the face mask in the photo I sent. “I truly detest pictures with face diapers on. At your age, are you seriously that scared of this?”

He mocked the idea of vaccination (“Why would I get a vaccine for a cold that I’m 99.9% sure to survive?”), and told me about a recent gathering in his town: “Lots and lots of people, hugging, shaking hands, everyone mingling. Almost like a real free America … almost.”

Throughout the pandemic, Frank and I have sent each other glimpses of our respective lives. His cheery videos last year of unmasked people clustered closely indoors looked like nihilism to me. Meanwhile, when looking at pictures of my masked life in Baltimore, he saw a heedless slide into a totalitarian culture.

We face each other across the chasm of polarization, the growing tendency to disparage those across the political aisle as enemies and villains. The distrust is corrosive, the temptation to turn away all too inviting. But as the latest surge of Covid cases attests, our fates remain hitched together, even when we can’t stand talking to each other. Whether Covid, the climate crisis, or the future of democracy, our very survival depends on nurturing a sense of common fate.

Vaccines and face masks have been turned into highly partisan commitments, making it hard to see those who choose otherwise as anything but senseless and unhinged. In my line of work, I have learned it takes patience and imagination to unravel what people truly care about. Anthropologists try to meet people with as much empathy and understanding as we can muster, even in the face of profound disagreement.

This is why I began traveling around the US after the 2016 election. I was alarmed by the menacing tone that conservative politics had taken, and I wanted to understand why this mood appealed so widely. Frank and I first crossed paths this way – but little did I know at the time, how much would hang on the simple question of whether we could get along.

Frank and I met at FreedomFest, an annual libertarian conference and conservative cultural festival in Las Vegas. It quickly became obvious that we hardly agreed on anything. I was disturbed by speakers who ridiculed a livable minimum wage. He talked about the high school kids who worked for him in southern Michigan, and high wages as a ticket to inertia.

Over drinks one evening, I asked a bartender for a drink without a straw, explaining I was concerned about disposable plastic. “I love plastic,” Frank responded with a mischievous smile.

Frank had been a wrestler in high school, and clearly both he and I enjoyed the verbal jousting. We kept in touch. Later that summer, I visited his town for a few days, and learned more about his life. Frank’s father had been a tool and die maker at an auto plant. Unable to afford college, Frank floated around for a few years, working oilfields in North Dakota, selling vacuum cleaners in Texas, keeping bees with a friend. A restaurant he started finally took off; now, he is still opening new places in his 50s, and putting his earnings into new properties.

“I’ve got shit everywhere,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh as he drove me around his town. “I think it comes from being poor. It’s like Monopoly – you just want to collect what you can before you lose it all.”

Frank and I are each committed to ways of living that the other finds reckless. He prides himself on being an American capitalist, and scoffs at the idea our economy might propel climate change, rightwing political violence or impossible degrees of inequality.

I, meanwhile, no doubt fit his stereotype of the oblivious college professor, lecturing privileged kids about utopian futures while freedoms crumble around us. He has chided me for this. “You are elite. You had a much better shot at the American dream than I ever did. Yet you give in to the totalitarians.”

“Why do you bother writing, if folks like me feel like such a problem to you?” I asked.

“Just clutching at straws,” he replied. “Trying to open up eyes, mostly to no avail.”

I’ve heard many a tirade from Frank about “handouts” and the welfare state, but he is also generous in his way. He’s flown out from Michigan at the drop of a hat to help distribute food to hurricane victims, or to stack sandbags against an impending flood. He dismisses the risks of a coronavirus infection, but he’s also donated thousands of dollars to small restaurants ailing under lockdown.

So much seems to depend on the lines we draw, what we feel we owe to others within and beyond those boundaries. “I’m good with dividing the country,” Frank declares. “One side gets the west and one side gets the east. We are self-sufficient. Your side is not.”

“Whether it’s capital or labor, land, air or water, we’re stuck together, left and right,” I reply. “We do in fact need each other.”

This has become, for us, a familiar impasse. He tends to distinguish between those worthy and unworthy of concern. I worry about what falls into the crevices of such divides.

As the pandemic took hold in the spring of 2020, my Facebook feed grew dense with confusion and alarm. Frank’s did too, but for different reasons. I anxiously tracked the development of an international crisis; Frank pieced together evidence of an unfolding “plandemic”. I noticed this only by taking a deliberate look at what he was sharing online. Social media platforms feed each of us what we’re most likely to want, deepening the tension between rival viewpoints.

Frank was especially furious about the restrictions imposed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer in his home state of Michigan. That April, he drove into Lansing with thousands of others, jamming the streets around the capitol for hours. One of the first anti-lockdown protests in the US, “Operation Gridlock” foreshadowed more violent events to come: an armed occupation of the statehouse, and even an alleged foiled plot to kidnap the governor.

“It was the worst traffic I’ve ever seen,” Frank chuckled on the phone, two days later.

His business had shifted to takeout sales, but others were folding, and he foresaw an economic disaster. “I’m good with 200,000 people dying,” Frank told me flatly that day, insisting that a depression would bring more pain.

Over the next few months, we argued regularly by text.

I tried to convince him the virus was serious, that masks were meant to protect others more than oneself. I showed him the sign my family had put up in front of our house for Halloween: “No Masks, No Candy.”

“That’s sad, perpetuating the fear,” Frank replied, sending a different image my way: a sketch of an enslaved 18th-century Afro-Brazilian woman named Anastacia, mask over her mouth and a collar around her neck, an offensive image that has circulated widely as an anti-masking meme. “That’s what we did to slaves to show who controlled whom.”

A middle-aged white man, Frank often used such language to decry mask mandates: being shackled, muzzled. “Your side enslaved me and my family.”

“It’s hardly the same,” I had to say. I wrote to him about the history of racism in the United States, describing things that even my own Indian American immigrant family had endured. “Slavery is not a metaphor, it was a historical fact with effects that echo today.”

“You know exactly what I mean,” Frank replied. “It is humiliating. It is emasculating. And it’s all based on a lie.”

I found what he said preposterous and disturbing, a brazen assertion of white privilege. But his claims were anchored in a steady stream of rightwing media pronouncements that lent them legitimacy. Conservative politicians had even turned George Floyd’s dying words – “I can’t breathe” – into an anti-masking gibe,

Floyd’s harrowing last words catalyzed one of the biggest solidarity movements in the history of the US. But elsewhere, social media was working to inoculate people like Frank against the power of these words, sowing indifference instead of concern: an inability to register the experience of others unlike oneself.

“I need the boot off my neck,” he kept telling me.

Those whom I’ve met on the American right through my research have taken different paths over the last five years. Some have broken in disgust with Trump and the Republican party. Others, like Frank, have dug in for the fight.

Soon after the lockdowns began, Frank got a yellow rattlesnake tattoo, along with that familiar rallying cry, “Don’t Tread on Me.” His social media posts grew angrier than I’d ever seen them. He was convinced the panic over the virus was manufactured to perpetrate political fraud and steal the presidential election.

Frank and a friend drove to DC for Trump’s “Stop The Steal” rally on 6 January. “I will never stand at a Fourth of July parade and pretend to be free again,” he wrote me on the way.

The next morning, he joined thousands of others at the rally, which he described as “massive and peaceful”. Instead of marching to the Capitol, he headed back to Michigan.

We’d been glued to a screen at home, watching what unfolded with horror. “This is the seat of government. It looks like an insurrection at the capital,” I texted.

“Maybe an insurrection is what it’s gonna take,” he shot back.

Frank wouldn’t condone the violence at the Capitol. But he also wanted me to understand why people were so angry. “Treat me like a child, you expect me not to be pissed?!

“Every day is a punch in the face with you guys. From fucking straws, to sodas, to not smoking in my own restaurant, to seatbelts, to threatening my guns, to forcing me to wear a mask … Every fucking day, it’s something else with you guys.”

His polemic took me aback. Frank was a libertarian, and I could see how such restrictions could grate. Still, I struggled to connect the dots to the assault on the Capitol.

For Frank, the storming of the Capitol was retaliation: the outburst of a populace long under siege, struggling against a power constantly wielded in the name of care. “We just want to live our fucking lives and be left alone,” he told me.

Who did Frank have in mind when he used that word, we? How broad was that community? How many Americans were willing to fight for this right, this indifference to the needs of others elsewhere?

For many, the pandemic has revealed the porous nature of our bodies and lives: the invisible ties between one and another, the need to do well by others. For others, it has affirmed the value of keeping apart, entrenching the deep histories of property, segregation and isolation that secure white wellbeing in the US.

I tell Frank that we need to learn how to live together, that the country and planet need this.“I’m over this,” he retorts. “I’m going to build my little hamlet.”

But life apart remains a fantasy more than anything else. Frank lives in a county with one of the lowest Covid vaccination rates in the state of Michigan, with a little more than 40% of eligible people fully vaccinated; the virus will harbor in such places.

Two weeks after the Capitol invasion, Frank sent me a video message from a small town in northern Indiana: dozens of men and women packed indoors at the sports bar, not a mask in sight.

I felt a pang at this glimpse of their easy laughter. One of my father’s closest friends had just died of Covid in another small town not far from there. He’d served that community for 40 years as a cardiologist, and had almost certainly contracted the disease from one of his patients, who were often reluctant to wear face masks.

So many of the battles we face depend on confronting the wider consequences of individual lives, nurturing a sense of mutual wellbeing.

When I shared the story, Frank was undeterred. “People die. I’ve never been afraid of it. I know it’s coming.”

I was feeling hurt and a little combative myself, and I started throwing facts and statistics back at him. “People are playing Russian roulette with the lives of their own neighbors, in the name of freedom, and the numbers show the price,” I shot back.

Frank remained defiant. “Freedom is more important to me.”

So many of the battles we face depend on confronting the wider consequences of individual lives, nurturing a sense of mutual wellbeing. Herd immunity proves this, essayist Eula Biss observes: “Those of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.”In the face of this difficult lesson, walls of retreat are a timeworn choice. Like many Americans on the right, Frank has lately given up trusting anything but conservative media. At his request, I’ve given him a pseudonym here. But he’s mostly given up on people like me. He faults me for failing to defend our liberties, and for being unwilling to leave my own “cocoon”, to see first-hand his unmasked pandemic life.I wish I could have done this. But I have my own family to care for and worry about.

Now and then on social media, I run across memes Frank posts about the vaccine. Amid the daunting new surge of Covid cases this summer, he shared a simple way to protect yourself from the spread of the Delta variant: just plug your ears to block out the news. Like many others, Frank remains steadfast in his refusal to wear a mask or take the vaccine. He says he’s probably had Covid and overcome it already, tough like the former president he reveres.

I hope Frank stays well. For masks and vaccines acknowledge something he won’t: the truth of our vulnerability, our capacity to wound and be wounded by others. I don’t know when Frank and I will talk again. But we remain exposed to each other’s whims and disdains. One way or another, we’ll have to figure out what to do with each other’s company.

Getting Ahead of Ourselves

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Having spent the better part of my life
trying either to relive the past
or experience the future before it arrives,
I have come to believe that
in between these two extremes is peace.

~Author Unknown~

I read a letter to the editor where the author complained about a prominent Halloween store display in August. Department store catalogs and circulars, TV ads, and other advertising also focus on what is coming rather than what is happening now.

Maybe this is all part of the rush to get to the next stage of our lives. Cars sprinting past my house every morning remind me of our rush to live in the future rather than in the present.

Are our lives so empty that we need to look past the current moment? Do we expect the future to be an improvement on the present? We forget that the past is over and the future is just a possibility. We don’t even know if we will be alive when the future arrives.

We can’t change the past and we can’t control or even predict the future. We can manage only the time we have right now and we do have a choice of what we do at this moment. We create our past by how we handle the present moment. We can influence our future by forging a path for our next steps.

So what can we do about right now? First, we can stop looking backward or forward at least for a little while. We can think about where we are right now. Most of us have heard the expression “living in the moment.” Is this just a saying or is there something to it?

We are wasting our time thinking about what might have been or what could be. That is unless we use our past to guide our current decisions or use our future goals to enlighten our current choices.

When we examine our past, it is easy to take ourselves to task for not doing things better. “How could I be so dumb?” We sometimes spend quite a bit of time fretting about the future as well. I have met more than a few people whose mantra is, “What if…” People paralyzed by what might happen find it hard to make any decisions at all.

Sometimes the present moment doesn’t call for a decision on our part. We can take a deep breath and enjoy its peace. How many such moments can you remember in your lifetime, or in the past week?

Most of us carry concerns around with us such as health, money or difficult people waiting in our path. But do we have to spend every moment of our lives wringing our hands? If we take time to enjoy a particular moment, our world will not fall apart. Instead we might find that our moments of reflection refresh us and sometimes give us a new perspective.

Action Steps

• When was the last time you took a moment just to exist?
• What was it like?
• Did the sky fall down?
• Try scheduling a few moments of peace for yourself.
• If you enjoy it, make it a habit.

Selection from my book Navigating Life: Commonsense Reflections for the Voyage

Delta Has Changed the Pandemic Risk Calculus

If you’re confused about what you can do right now, you should be.

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Written by Amanda Mull and published in The Atlantic 8/18/2021

For the past year and a half, humans around the world have been asked to do something we’re pretty bad at, even in the best of circumstances: figure out what constitutes safety, and act accordingly. A well-understood risk doesn’t necessarily improve our thought processes, thanks to a host of cognitive biases and external pressures that pull some people away from the lowest-level danger and push others toward clear peril. In the United States, at least, the circumstances for making these decisions during the pandemic have been far from ideal, as millions of people have been yanked in either direction by misinformation or political stratification or financial necessity.

A NEW GUIDE TO LIVING THROUGH CLIMATE CHANGE

Vaccination was a reprieve from this calculus of personal danger, at least for a while—get vaccinated, get your family and friends vaccinated, get back to a far more normal version of life. To a certain extent, that logic holds: The vaccines are still doing a fantastic job preventing hospitalization and death from the coronavirus’s far-more-transmissible Delta variant. But as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have roared back, concerns about breakthrough cases among the vaccinated and increased transmissibility among kids have muddied a lot of people’s ability to gauge their own day-to-day risk, just as they’d begun to venture back out into the world and hug, eat, and laugh in the same airspace together again. In some ways, pandemic life is more confusing than ever.

What makes our current moment tricky is that pandemic risk has never been more highly variable, which means the list of things to consider about any given situation is longer and has fewer hard-and-fast rules. Vaccinated people are still far safer than they’ve been for most of the past year and a half, and the unvaccinated are in even more danger than they were in March 2020. The Delta variant is, in some respects, a whole new ball game. What rules are we playing by now that Delta behaves differently from those that came before it in key ways: It spreads between people far more effectively, it seems more likely to cause a contagious “breakthrough infection” in vaccinated people, and it appears to spread more readily and lead to symptomatic disease more often among kids too young to be vaccinated. Whether Delta causes more virulent disease is, for now, an open question. We’ll get to more open questions shortly.

Read: How the pandemic now ends

Because of these differences, there are two categories of things you should consider when you contemplate booking a vacation or responding to a wedding invite. The first is what you might reasonably know about your situation and the event at hand. “It’s your vaccination, and then the vaccination levels of people around you, and then the disease rates happening around you,” Tara Kirk Sell, a researcher who studies risk communication at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “Do you have kids or not? Are they going to school?” All of these types of questions, she said, help paint a picture of the potential danger you might represent to unprotected people around you, should you get sick. The less likely you are to be exposed and the fewer unvaccinated or immunocompromised people you could conceivably infect, the more confident you should feel.

Assessing risk pre-vaccination was often bleak, but at least the variables at play were somewhat limited: ventilation, masks, crowds, local spread. Now the number of additional, usually hyper-specific questions that people must ask themselves is itself a barrier to good decision making, says Jennifer Taber, a psychologist at Kent State University who studies health risk assessment. “When people feel like things are uncertain, they engage in avoidance,” Taber told me. That can manifest in disparate ways. An unwillingness to acknowledge that many new things are safe for the average vaccinated person is avoidance. So is a refusal to continue taking even minor precautions for the benefit of others.

All of this is made worse given that accurate answers to risk-related questions can be frustrating to gather and difficult to parse, especially in places where local governments limit data collection, and where admitting to being vaccinated can be social apostasy. “There are so many things that make it harder, and not a lot of things that make it easier right now,” Taber said. “Even within the context of good information, there’s so much uncertainty that it makes it really hard for people to make really well-informed decisions.”

That brings us to the second, murkier category of information to consider when gauging the safety of a situation: What do we actually know about the Delta variant and the risks it presents? The situation is, unfortunately, evolving. Because the United States is testing at only a fraction of the rate of countries such as Israel and the U.K.—stop me if this is giving you flashbacks to the spring of 2020—the frustrating reality is that we just do not have a reliable picture of how much infection is currently happening here. When you don’t have an accurate denominator on which to base things such as rate of breakthrough, hospitalization, or death, you have a pretty useless fraction. (Unfortunately, for similar reasons, we are also short on accurate numerators—the CDC is not tracking things like breakthrough infections, and state-level data are sparse.)

Read: The messiest phase of the pandemic yet

Unvaccinated people tend to be clustered both geographically and socially in the United States, and so national or even state-level rates of vaccination are not terribly useful in understanding personal risk. The catastrophic spikes in infection currently devastating places with low vaccination rates, such as southern Louisiana and southeastern Missouri, change how even vaccinated people in those places should think about socializing or traveling, relative to their counterparts in places with high community buy-in on vaccines. Because they are far more likely to be exposed to the virus than someone living in, say, Vermont or Maine, the knock-on effect is a far greater likelihood of spreading the infection to others. And as Florida’s current outbreak makes clear, even middle-of-the-road statewide vaccination rates will not be enough to dampen Delta’s spread on their own.

These gaps in information and state-by-state discrepancies make any sort of risk generalizations difficult, if not counterproductive. What we do know is that vaccination remains the best way to stay healthy, by far: According to a survey of hospitals from ABC News, 94 percent of COVID-19 patients in ICUs at the end of July were unvaccinated, and most of the rest had health problems that likely contributed to decreased vaccine effectiveness. Young, healthy vaccinated people who are working in person or socializing in crowds should take precautions around elderly or immunocompromised friends and family, even if they are also vaccinated, but overall, vaccinated people still can feel quite confident in their personal safety.

How the vaccines are doing against any level of infection is less clear. The most recent and comprehensive data available—from the U.K.—suggest that current vaccine regimens are somewhat less effective against Delta than against previous strains of the virus, but the difference isn’t enormous. If that information feels at odds with reports you’ve heard about breakthrough infections in the U.S., it isn’t necessarily—uncontrolled spread of a highly infectious disease means that even relatively uncommon events are going to happen in pretty large numbers.

Speaking of breakthroughs: One thing that needs to be accounted for is the potential of infecting others if you become sick, even after getting vaccinated. A few weeks ago, the CDC raised eyebrows by estimating that vaccinated people who manage to get infected by Delta may produce the same amount of virus in their nose as unvaccinated, Delta-infected people do—an unexpected sign that vaccinated people could be equally contagious when infected. But the agency’s analysis was based on specific and fairly extreme circumstances: an outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, among a mostly vaccinated group during a week of festivities in which people crowded into old, poorly ventilated buildings. A large analysis of Delta transmission in the U.K. found that vaccinated people carry, on average, lower levels of virus in their nose, which suggests less ability to transmit the virus; a recent study from Singapore found that vaccinated patients were able to clear the virus much faster, shortening the number of days during which they might be contagious. (Although no data are available quite yet, the efficiency with which vaccinated people clear the virus is also thought to make the sometimes severe post-viral COVID-19 symptoms commonly known as long COVID considerably less likely, by preventing the illness from settling in the lungs.)

What must be acknowledged now, a year and a half into the pandemic, is that COVID-19 is not the only risk that people need to balance. Forgoing regular socializing, routine medical checkups, and in-person schooling might be worthwhile in the short term, but abstaining from all of those things in perpetuity comes with its own dangers. “What we’ve given up is not nothing,” Kirk Sell told me. “Something that has been lost in the past year and a half are the trade-offs, and the introduction of readily available and highly effective vaccines and some people’s refusal to get them just makes all of this internal math so much trickier.” As someone who studies risk communication, she said, she hates the phrase an abundance of caution. If you find yourself determining that things you want to do are pretty low risk and still shy away from them, you’re likely cutting yourself off from opportunities that may provide significant health benefits: getting out to exercise, resuming regular social relationships with vaccinated friends and family.

Kirk Sell uses her own decision calculus as an example of what those kinds of evaluations might look like: She thinks it’s very important for her kids to have school in person, even though they are too young to be vaccinated, but she is also actively lobbying the school to implement ways to make that safer, such as enhanced ventilation and filtration. For parents whose kids did relatively well in Zoom school or whose community is in the middle of a serious outbreak, she says, the best conclusion might be a different one, and it might change for any parent as the school year progresses and local case rates go up and down.

Read: The coronavirus is here forever. This is how we live with it.

Try thinking about precautions in non-pandemic terms, Kirk Sell advises. Every day, people follow safety rules that might not be personally necessary for them, but that also aren’t onerous enough to be harmful—doing so is simply part of living in a society in which you share norms and risk with those around you. “I can swim, but when I go out kayaking, I still wear a life jacket, because it’s required as a general safety approach,” she explained. “Just because you are safe doesn’t mean you don’t have any rules to follow anymore.” This is, perhaps, somewhat understating it: Before Kirk Sell was a scholar, she was an Olympic-medalist swimmer who held the world record in the 100-meter breaststroke. There are few people on Earth at less personal risk from tipping out of a kayak. So, yes, you can probably find it within yourself to continue to wear a mask at the grocery store if the infection rate is growing in your area. You probably do other stuff on that same logic all the time.

If you have read all this hoping to get some solid answers on what you should be doing and now feel like it would have been easier for me to publish, say, a shruggy emoji, I sympathize. It can be difficult to feel like you’re doing the right thing when what that means is so different from person to person, depending on their particular circumstances. People frequently use the behavior of those around them to guide their own understanding of risk, Taber told me, and the fact that everyone around you now has a whole host of personal circumstances to consider when making their own decisions can short-circuit our ability to do that as confidently as we might have a year ago.

Americans will likely be riding this roller coaster of risk assessment for some time. Periods of confusion are natural as we learn what waves of the Delta variant under the country’s modest-at-best safety protocols look like, and we’ve yet to see how swiftly the next wave can be expected after one ends. People are tired of good behavior, and they’re tired of self-abnegating to protect others whom they perceive as refusing to protect themselves, even if that’s not an accurate understanding of why many people have yet to be vaccinated. Right now, the best that most people can do is continue to control whichever straightforward variables they can—get vaccinated, sit outside when possible, choose places that require proof of vaccination over those that don’t, avoid visiting Grandma or your cousin’s new baby the week after attending an indoor concert with a thousand screaming people, get a test if your throat is sore. The situation we’re all in is extremely complicated, but the best ways to keep yourself and others safe still aren’t.

Amanda Mull is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Prosperity

Not What You Think

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What is prosperity?

To me, prosperity means living in balance with the riches of the universe and giving what I can to help others live their lives. It also means enjoying in a non-possessive way the riches which come my way. I once lived in a monastery and had a vow of poverty. This did not mean I lived my life in squalor. It meant that I did not own anything. Material things including the clothes on my back were set aside for my use but I did not own them. Yet I did not feel poor and everything I needed was provided for me.

I once thought prosperity meant having plenty of money

I have known a variety of people who had much more money than I could even dream of but they were not prosperous. Instead, their money had the goal of increasing their wealth. They clung to their money, and were unaware of the gifts nature has in store, or the simple pleasures of helping other people live their lives to the fullest.

How did I come to understand prosperity?

When I was naive, I thought that prosperity was a contract with God in which I was promised a share in the wealth of the universe in exchange for my sharing what I had with others. Almost like a barter system. It was like God had a store and if  I behaved correctly, I could go there and pick out what I wanted.

How do I see it now?

I have since learned that prosperity is not a contract in the sense that I will not receive any given amount of money by God. I thought of the bible passage about the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Even plants find soil in which to grow by their seeds following the wind.

What have I learned through this awareness?

I have come to understand that my role is to work hard, be organized and plan for the future. Yet worrying about the future does not get me anywhere. There are constructive things I can do about the future but worrying about it is not one of them. If I do my part God will be there for me when my need arises.

How can we get to that point?

With an open mind, each of us will be able to see what is necessary to do and what is in the best interest of ourselves and that of others. Worry only serves to distract us from what it is possible to do. Staying at peace with ourselves, with the universe, and with God keeps us focused on what is possible.

Takeaway

I started this article suggesting that staying in balance is the key to prosperity. Buying everything we can or pining over things we can’t afford keeps us off balance. Prosperity means being grateful for all the good things coming our way on a daily basis. You might want to try something I have found useful. I started keeping a daily diary many years ago. Each entry began with a list of five things for which I was grateful that day. This has helped me stay focused on the prosperity which surrounds me.

The word from anti-vaxxers

Things Anti-Vaccers Told Me This Week

They want more understanding

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Written by Jessica Wildfire and published in Medium.com 8/9/2021

The anti-vaxxers are angry at us. They say we’ve been judgmental. We don’t listen to them. We don’t respect their views.

So I started listening.

Here’s what they have to say:

Rules don’t work, so we shouldn’t have them.

Some anti-vaxxers have said they’re not following health guidelines simply because it’s being forced on them. The same goes for masks and social distancing. They say putting mandates in place hasn’t stopped the virus from spreading, because people don’t follow the rules.

That means rules are pointless.

It’s oppressive to make rules and try to get people to follow them, because most people are going to ignore those rules. So you’re really just punishing people following their own nature.

There’s no point in trying to modify anyone’s behavior. If you’re going to try, you should be nice and non-confrontational about it.

That way, it’s easier to ignore you.

The same logic applies to masks. The cheap cloth masks don’t stop the spread of these more contagious variants. So instead of trying to find better masks, we should just ditch them altogether. Besides, there’s no point in asking someone to make small sacrifices for someone else. Everyone’s responsible for their own health. (We’ll talk more about that later.)

It doesn’t matter how many lives are at stake. We should always just present information and let people make up their own minds. If half the population is making a poor choice, then the other half just have to mask up and stay home or get out of their way. It doesn’t matter whether we have jobs, vulnerable relatives, or kids who belong in school.

It’s your life.

Just figure it out.

In their view, we should just let everyone do their own research and make their own health decisions. It’s pointless to worry about whether you get someone else infected.

That leads to their next point.

Everyone’s responsible for their own health.

Anti-vaxxers still believe the coronavirus targets unhealthy people, especially the ones who don’t take care of themselves. So if you exercise and eat healthy, then you have nothing to worry about.

You’re invincible.

In this worldview, every single aspect of your health is under your control. There’s no such thing as hereditary disease. Everyone is born with a fundamentally healthy body and mind. What you do with that is up to you. It’s sad that some people live in areas without access to decent grocery stores. It’s too bad that companies thrive on marketing junk food to poor people, and they go to great lengths to suppress information about their products. It’s too bad that fast food chains smother America.

There’s nothing we can do about this. It’s the way the world works. You should just eat healthy and not worry about anything else.

We’re not sure what “eating healthy” means. It could mean eating fruits and vegetables, but maybe not. It could mean a paleo diet, a keto diet, an Atkins diet, or a blood-type diet. It could mean taking any number of supplements which might or might not work. It probably means following the advice of fitness gurus and eating what they promote on their social media channels, and their self-published e-books.

The best course of action during a pandemic is to follow your diet guide and do absolutely nothing else to keep yourself from catching it. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Sure, there’s stories about fit, healthy young people getting really sick with coronavirus. They might take years to recover, or maybe never. There’s more studies showing that even if Covid doesn’t kill you, it can leave you with serious long term illness and disability.

Again, that’s just life.

Nobody can prove anything.

Some anti-vaxxers have said there’s no way to gather any definitive information on the coronavirus, so there’s no point in having debates. There’s no definitive proof that mRNA vaccines are safe. There’s no definitive proof that the coronavirus infects healthy people and kids.

There’s no definitive proof that the virus is mutating into deadlier variants that could escape immunity altogether.

The only way to prove something for certain is to see it happen for yourself. Until then, you might as well do whatever you want. That means living your normal life, until you get infected.

We all take risks. Driving around in your car poses the same risk as carrying on with your normal routine during a pandemic.

All risks are created equal.

If it’s not happening to you, it doesn’t matter.

Anti-vaxxers put their own choices above everything else.

Don’t tell them what to do, it’s that simple.

Lots of anti-vaxxers have said there’s no evidence that they should be worried about the coronavirus, because they haven’t been infected with it. Nobody they know has been infected with it either.

There’s no evidence that hospitals are overrun, because the hospitals where they live are doing just fine. One of them even told me, “If any of this were true, it would be front page news.”

(Actually, it is.)

It’s fine to use anecdotal evidence to make important decisions. In fact, anecdotal evidence can outmatch statistical data. It’s just as valid, because what you personally observe in your own life is more important than what’s happening anywhere else in the world.

Out of sight, out of mind.

All information is subjective.

There’s a reason why the information you share with anti-vaxxers doesn’t persuade them. They didn’t budge on masking or social-distancing either. It’s because that’s just your opinion.

Any evidence you present is always incomplete and partial. It can always be challenged by another piece of information.

The media is controlled.

The CDC is controlled, along with every other agency and fact-checking organization. The information they trust is what they found digging through the web on their own, from people who already agree with them. This information beats yours, always.

That’s because you’re brainwashed, and you get your information from biased sources who have an agenda. They don’t have one.

Only you do.

Everyone has a right to a bad opinion.

Anti-vaxxers have told me they’re taking a principled stand on their own individual rights and personal freedoms.

To summarize:

• If someone wants to catch Covid and take their chances, that’s their right. It doesn’t matter if they spread the virus.
• If someone else dies, it’s because they should’ve taken better care of themselves — even unvaccinated children.
• There’s no proof that healthy people or children are at risk, even if we’re starting to see more kids in hospitals. The only way to prove that is for thousands of kids to get sick and die. Even if that happens, it’s probably just liberal propaganda.
• We should just let everyone do what they want, and then we’ll see how many people die this coming year.

That’s a fair representation of their stance. It’s exactly what they’ve said to me when it comes to handling the pandemic.

If you point out how selfish or ignorant this sounds, then you’re being judgmental. You’re the hateful one who’s creating division. You’re the one who has a closed mind, not them.

You’re the bad guy.

It’s fine if someone else wants to endanger their own lives, and put yours at risk. It’s fine for corrupt politicians and shock jocks to spread misinformation to tens of millions of people. It’s fine to harass and ridicule health workers and experts you disagree with. It’s fine to openly speculate that maybe it’s the vaccinated people who are responsible for everything, including variants that appeared before vaccines were even available. It’s fine to take it all back after you get really sick, and need their help.

Calling them out makes you petty and sanctimonious.

Anti-vaxxers are allowed to publicly air skepticism and suspicion about vaccines. They’re allowed to threaten doctors and nurses and accuse them of murder. They’re allowed to compare vaccine passports to yellow stars and pink triangles, or even concentration camps.

You’re supposed to listen to them.

You’re supposed to nod.

It’s fine to believe whatever you want until you get someone killed. It’s fine to refuse masks and vaccines and then infect someone, watch them die, and then blame liberals. Nobody should ever make you feel bad for your colossal mistakes, especially if you never admit them. Everyone makes mistakes that result in incalculable levels of death and suffering.

It’s arrogant and hateful to point out someone else’s logical fallacies and unconscious biases. It’s immature to criticize someone else’s poor behavior or reckless decision making. If you were truly empathetic, you would just shrug and leave them alone.

Your hardships and sacrifices over the last year mean nothing to them. You should be kind to the ones who’ve mocked you for wearing a mask and intentionally invaded your personal space at stores, making you anxious to be in public. You should smile at those who’ve disregarded your rights. You should be understanding as they call you a brainwashed sheep, until they finally get sick and deprive you of a hospital bed.

Idiots have a right to their opinion. They have a right to respect. They have a right to affordable healthcare.

You don’t.

Whatever you do, never repeat their views back to them.

That’s offensive.

Respecting Our Wisdom and Judgment

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Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.

~Bergen Evans~

Have you ever thought about how we end up doing the things we do? Have you ever acted a certain way and then thought to yourself, “That was dumb?” I would guess all of us have from time to time. Those of us with experience as parents have often watched our children getting into trouble by not thinking first. I would dare say one of the main jobs of parents is to get their children to think before they act.

Knowledge is a collection of facts. Wisdom is the way we evaluate our actions and put them into perspective. Judgment involves thinking before acting. People sometimes are able to recite all the facts about what will happen if they act a certain way but don’t take the consequences seriously. Criminals are well aware of the consequences of their crimes but somehow don’t think the rules apply to them.

Sometimes we make up our own rules as we go along. We expect one thing from everyone else but have our own private set of rules for our actions. I think we sometimes forget why there are rules in the first place or don’t consider them as applying to us. 

When we were children, the ultimate authority lay in our parents. Even if we did not understand the rules or want to accept them, our parents said these were the rules “because I said so.” As we became older, most of us took the time to understand why we have rules. It is a way of knowing what to expect from others and what others expect from us.

Respecting the rules is a way of respecting each other. Could you imagine driving down the road and not knowing whether another driver will stop at a red light, drive on the expected side of the road or obey traffic signs?

Wisdom is not always written down as laws or rules. Much of wisdom is the result of learning over generations about consequences and the best way to do things. Some of this wisdom ends up in the laws of our civilization but some of it is handed down in our family traditions. We can learn everything the hard way, but we save ourselves a great deal of trouble by learning from our forebears. The problem is that it takes a certain amount of wisdom to recognize the wisdom of others. We sometimes think we know best and can learn everything we need to on our own.

We might be able to find our own path, but it is like clearing a way through a jungle when there is a nearby path waiting for us to follow it. Do we really want to spend all that time learning what others have learned and rediscovering paths which our ancestors have forged? We do have a choice.

Action Steps

• Think about what lessons you have learned from your parents and grandparents.
• Compare what happens when you listen to wisdom or act impulsively.
• Who are the wise people in your life now?
• What can you learn from them?
• What would it take to share your wisdom with others?

Selection from Navigating Life: Commonsense Reflections for the Voyage

They Regret Passing Up the Vaccine

They rejected coronavirus shots in vaccine-rich countries. In the hospital, they changed their minds.

Written by Jennifer Hassan and Adela Suliman and published in the Washington Post 8/6/2021

Photo by Kilian M on Pexels.com

LONDON — The fit and healthy bodybuilder in England. The religious woman from Canada. A conservative talk radio host in Tennessee.

All chose not to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, despite living in countries where doses are plentiful. But after contracting the disease and falling severely ill, they have since expressed an overwhelming sense of regret and urged others not to make the same mistakes they did — some just days before they died.

John Eyers, from the seaside town of Southport in England, loved hiking, camping and running. The 42-year-old competed in ironman challenges, triathlons and bodybuilding competitions. Four weeks before Eyers died of the coronavirus in the hospital, he had posed for photographs posted on Facebook standing atop the Welsh mountains.

His twin sister, Jenny McCann, wrote on Twitter this week that he was the “fittest, healthiest” person she knew but explained that he had a “belief in his own immortality.”

She said the hospital did everything to save him, but he died as a result of infection and organ failure.

Eyers, who was placed on a ventilator, told a nurse shortly before he died that he “wished he had been vaccinated,” McCann said.

These stories offer a window into the dynamics behind the global inequality of vaccine distribution. Eyers’s story gained widespread attention in the United Kingdom, where some 88 percent of those age 18 and over have received at least one shot, but officials are weighing how to convince swaths of the younger population to get inoculated, especially given that vaccinating children is proving highly contentious.

The United States, where some 58 percent of the total population have received at least one dose, and Canada, where 70 percent have, face similar issues even as regions such as Africa and much of Asia struggle to get vaccine supply at all.

In Canada, 33-year-old Katharina Giesbrecht, a follower of the Mennonite faith, believed she didn’t need to get vaccinated because God would protect her from the virus. “He knows what the next step is, whether we die or we don’t,” she told Canada’s CBC News.

Giesbrecht, who lives alone in the province of Manitoba, said she contracted the disease in May, despite wearing protective gear when leaving the house. She said she feared she would die as her breathing became worse, eventually landing her in the hospital with pneumonia. Now, Giesbrecht says she has since booked her vaccine and wants to encourage others who are religious and hesitant to receive their doses, too.

“God gave us doctors for a reason, and medicine that we can use to help us feel better,” Giesbrecht told CBC. Hospital officials from the Boundary Trails Health Center, southwest of Winnipeg, where Giesbrecht received treatment, told CBC in June that nearly all patients admitted with covid-19 had been unvaccinated.

“I should have gotten the damn vaccine,” 39-year-old Micheal Freedy of Las Vegas texted his fiancee, Jessica DuPreez, shortly before he died of the coronavirus, which put him in an intensive care unit last month.

Freedy was not opposed to vaccination, DuPreez told The Washington Post this week. But like many Americans who have yet to get their shots, the father of five wanted to wait and learn more about how people reacted to the vaccines before he got inoculated.

“I would take a bad reaction to the vaccine over having to bury my husband. I would take that any day,” Freedy’s fiancee, who is now an avid campaigner for people to get vaccinated, told CNN.

A poll this week found that just over half of unvaccinated adults (53 percent) said they believed getting vaccinated posed a bigger risk to their health than getting infected with the coronavirus, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation on Wednesday.

Officials in the United States have said that cases are primarily occurring in unvaccinated populations.

In Italy, almost 99 percent of those who died of covid-19 since February were not fully vaccinated, the country’s National Health Institute said last week. The data found that the few fully vaccinated people who died of covid were significantly older than those who died without getting a full course of immunization, and had more underlying health problems before contracting the virus.

Meanwhile, Britain’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, said last month that 60 percent of people being admitted to British hospitals with the coronavirus were unvaccinated.

In Israel, where more than 60 percent of people have received at least one dose, there is a vocal minority of so-called “refuseniks,” especially among the ultra-Orthodox community, according to Health Ministry data published on Thursday.

Although more than 4.36 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, according to Our World in Data, a research organization, just 1.1 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose — highlighting the deep socioeconomic divides that persist in this pandemic.

But the stories from — and about — the ex-vaccine-resistant may have the potential to convince others.

Chris Downham, a friend of Eyers from England, wrote on Facebook: “I was on the fence about getting the vaccine, I thought I’d wait a year or so after all I am never ill and surely would have no problems even if I caught COVID. I even posted on Facebook with this kind of sentiment.”

“How wrong I was,” he continued. “I played hockey with John Eyers and still can’t believe that the fittest guy I knew has died from COVID. I expect he’d do things differently if he had the chance.”

Review of Karen Armstrong’s The Bible

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I was leaving the library recently and stopped to see what discard books were available for free. Among them was a book by Karen Armstrong. I had previously read several of her books and found her to be clear, focused and always interesting. My favorite book of hers was Through the Narrow Gate, a story about her time as a nun in England. I found that her experience in the cloistered convent life fairly closely paralleled my time living in a Catholic seminary and monastery.  (see Young Man of the Cloth- https://www.amazon.com/Young-Man-Cloth-Joseph-Langen-ebook/dp/B072N8QQFY/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Young+Man+of+the+Cloth&qid=1628358391&s=books&sr=1-1)

The book was written in 2007 but this was the first I had heard of it. I thought that it would be interesting. I started reading with few expectations but recalled how fascinating I found her previous books. I found the book more than I anticipated. Her style and focus are very academic. I felt that I was sitting among the thousands of bible scholars who lived throughout the ages.

I thought the title could have easily been “The Bibles.” I knew that the early history of the Jews was an oral tradition and was only written down much later. I also knew that none of the Christian parts of the Bible was written by anyone who lived in the time of Jesus. So that started as oral tradition too.

The most important distinction in making sense of the Bible is that there are four different ways or senses of the scripture as the author calls them:

1. Literal- taking it at face value
2. Allegory- greater meaning than is evident on the surface
3. Moral homiletics- lessons learned from the main sense
4. Mystical culmination-  union with the divine beyond the intellect

As the years and centuries passed, controversy arose about which stories and writings should be included in what has come to be known as the Bible. No clear consensus arose as to what was important. Sometimes contradictory accounts were both included without an attempt at resolution of the conflicts.

One example is the story of creation which is definitely outside the scope of what we know of the earth and its creatures based on scientific inquiry. The Bible contains two contradictory accounts of creation, neither of which can be understood literally although some traditions and peoples maintain that the accounts in Genesis are literally accurate.

Throughout the ages scholars and teachers have wrestled with how to interpret the Bible. Some held that scholars should seek an understanding of the Bible and then share it with ordinary people. Others, especially since the invention of the printing press, have held that the Bible should be made available to everyone.

Most of the book chronicles the various struggles among traditions to arrive at the “correct” interpretation of the Bible. One controversy has been the idea that God condones violence under certain conditions. In the Jewish section there are accounts of great slaughters of people, ostensibly at the direction of God. In the Christian part of the Bible, there is no condoning of violence based on the life and teachings of Jesus. Yet the Crusades (as well as witch trials and the Inquisition) were conducted under the mantle of Christianity and perpetrators of these slaughters were ostensibly following the will of God.

To me, the most important part of this book is the Epilogue.  Here the author suggests how people living in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions as well as other spiritual traditions might come together in a mutually respectful way. This includes first understanding the limitations of one’s own scriptures and associated writings, and then “listen with humility generosity and charity” to the understandings based on the various traditions beyond our own. We can take these understandings with us as we consider issues such as the place of women in the various traditions, embracing people of non-heterosexual orientation, and people of various political leanings other than our own.

This book goes into great detail about the life of “The Bible” and of those who have endeavored to make sense of it and to live by it. I found my comfort level challenged as I waded through the pages. Bible scholars would most likely be more comfortable with this account. Yet there are insights for the rest of us depending on the effort we are willing to put into it.