NYTimes | Many vaccinated Americans are tired, disgusted and eager to assign blame. Public health experts and government officials, including some Republicans, have shifted from sensitive prodding to firm condemnation of those forgoing vaccination. Private conversations among the inoculated take an even less diplomatic turn: “We were so close, and these stupid, unvaccinated jerks ruined it for the rest of us.”
Fatigue and outrage are appropriate emotions, considering all that has been lost to Covid-19: lives, jobs, experiences, money, physical and mental health. But those feelings, if not properly channeled, can themselves take a heavy toll. What do we do with our anger?
I am a progressive woman who resides in a conservative state. I am on record in this fractured political era as a proponent of maintaining connection across gulfs of understanding, with the caveat that this civic burden falls to people whose social privileges allow them to engage safely with “the other side.” But seeking to understand dangerous behaviors and beliefs is quite different than permitting them. I myself, by many accounts an amiable person, once yelled at a truck stop full of unmasked people to read the sign on the goddamn door.
Fury — collective, generational, political, cultural, individual — is utterly familiar to me, more so than the happy serenity of my current life. I was a child in poverty during the 1980s “farm crisis,” when federal policies favoring big corporations devastated rural communities. Everywhere I turned, something was dying: the local grocery store, the family farm, the cancer victims whose water supply contained agricultural runoff. There was joy in my family, but there was also addiction, abuse and neglect that drew from a deep well of justifiable rage and sorrow.
Anger is a contagious energy that jumps quickly from one person to the next. It will seize your mind and body as its host. If allowed to explode, it will hurt others. If allowed to implode, it will hurt you. I had to learn early how to transmute it for the sake of my own survival. I found that it can be the source of a powerful alchemy. If we are up to the task, it could help us create something good together.
Our national conversation has reached the point where many Americans are done with any and all excuses offered by the unvaccinated. Some of the inoculated are not just self-righteous but downright venomous, arguing on social media that hospitals should refuse to admit unvaccinated Covid-19 patients, calling them trash and wishing them a painful death. Residents of blue America have pronounced this a red-America problem. “Our state did a great job fighting the pandemic,” one person tweeted. “Our reward? The mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers in adjacent red states flooded their hospitals and spilled over into ours.”
Old political resentments have found a new outlet in the fraught vaccine debate. “I’ve been pissed off since Reagan was elected,” another Twitter user quipped in a thread parsing the emotions of the vaccinated. Exhausted, despairing minds find comfort in turning complex realities into simple, opposing categories. The noble, upstanding vaccinated American and the selfish, stupid, unvaccinated one. The good liberal citizen and the far-right anti-vaxxer.
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