The other day, while walking home from lunch at the Pancho Villa cafe, I ran into my favorite anti-vaxxer, who remarked that I wasn’t wearing a mask. Her tone was anything but censorious — she was maskless as well — leading me to believe she was hopeful that I’d joined the tribe of vaccine refusniks. I was sorry to disappoint her, pointing out the obvious — I was outside and alone — and the not so obvious — I’d been vaccinated. “You know what’s in those vaccines, don’t you?” she asked. I replied that I had a pretty good idea what but that it probably wasn’t the substance she had in mind. Indeed it wasn’t. “Mercury and aluminum,” she informed me. “And a naturopath I read online has said that she will NOT accept patients who have been vaccinated because they give off stuff like mercury and aluminum.” I asked, “Do you mean like it’s on their breath or comes off as vapor from their pores?” My friend only smiled, and backed away a foot or two, apparently afraid that I would infect her with mercury-aluminum poisoning if she stood any closer. Her version of social distancing. I offered to put on a mask if it would make her more comfortable, she inquired what color it was, I answered that it was a standard pale blue surgical mask. She shook her head. Blue masks were the worst! “If you knew what they’re putting in them…” She trailed off, leaving me to guess who ‘they’ were and what toxins had been injected into facial coverings. I broke off our conversation, sensing that it would soon drift into the domain of space aliens, QAnon conspiracies, and government plots to rob us of our vital bodily fluids.

As i mentioned in the previous post, #29, I’ve given up arguing with people who think like her (if their mental processes can by dignified as thinking), but the brief encounter reminded me that the Pandemic has exposed a kind of social cancer in our society, one that has metastasized, possibly, to Stage 4. American individualism, our strength and our virtue, has been pushed to an extreme and has become a flaw and a weakness. David Brooks points out in his New York Times column  today that we are no longer capable of collective action, of pulling together to achieve a national goal, in the present case eradication of the COVID19 virus. The response to it has been, at first, complete denial, as expressed by former President Trump’s assurance that it would soon vanish, “like a miracle,” to a reluctant and uneven acceptance of its reality, with vast numbers of our citizens refusing to obey the most basic public health requirements, and now to get vaccinated. If that endangers ones fellow countrymen, well, that’s the price of liberty, right? My friend, she of the mercury-aluminum school, is not a lonely outlier but representative of the thirty percent of our populace who decline inoculation or who mindlessly shout “USA!” at anti-mask, anti-restriction rallies.

The last time I remember a spirit of unity in the U.S. was in the wake of 9/11, and that didn’t last long. Our lack of coherence as a society is a river with many sources, but its main one is distrust of government. It sprang up fifty years ago on the left, in response to the Vietnam War, but eventually flowed to the right with the election of Ronald Reagan, and has now spread just about everywhere. If we’d been as we are today in 1941, we could not have mustered the cohesion to win World War Two.

 

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