72: Routine pain

There seems to be something indelibly broken in the heart of this country that allowed us to get to this place

Youth Mourning, by George Clausen, 1916.

We’re now on the way to having not two, but three vaccines, pharmaceutical solutions to the pandemic that came both sooner and with greater efficacy than most optimists would have predicted. Some half a dozen or so of my friends and family have joined that growing-but-still-exclusive club of the vaccinated, and the people I was most concerned about—both of my parents and aunts and uncles in their age range—have almost all received at least one shot, which is an enormous relief. Public health experts are predicting some aspects of our lives to return to normalcy this summer. If things play out right, that will mean that myself and those closest to me will have made it through this period of global trauma, for the most part, physically and financially intact.

So I’m feeling pretty great, right? Waking up with a fresh sense of optimism, a triumph of the human spirit on the brink of its culmination. Resuming life’s plans and aspirations. Cause for celebration. That’s how you feel, right? Pretty awesome? No?

Yeah me neither. Truth is, I still feel pretty much like shit. And then I feel guilty for feeling like shit. And then I get up and do my work and respond to my emails and make dinner, all the while feeling like my hair is on fire with dread that we still haven’t made it through the worst, that over 500,000 people are dead in the US, 2.5 million in the world, gone, and that there seems to be something indelibly broken in the heart of this country in particular that allowed us to get to this place. To be one of the worst hit countries in the world in spite of all of our advantages. Wondering what in god’s name is wrong with us that we could let this happen. Seeing all the broken and jagged parts of the country in such harsh light and knowing that until we figure this out and fix it we will not fare any better when the next big bad thing happens.

That is bleak, I know, and you know what maybe that’s about some stuff that’s going on inside over here, and maybe most of you guys are actually doing pretty good these days. But I suspect a lot of us are probably feeling something like this. Stuck in a gloomy limbo somewhere between panic and hope, trying to start up the engine but it’s just not turning over yet. Can’t quite make those summer plans.

I think part of it is the fact that, while we grow ever more certain about the virus and how to beat it, whether we actually will still feels so far from a done deal. For one, the vaccine rollout is going not super great, even though in this case, we actually knew we were going to have to do this and had months to prepare. In Massachusetts, just 6.6% of the population has been vaccinated so far. Our governor is coming under increasing criticism and the only solution he seems to ever have for anything is to relax restrictions on businesses, when what they really need is a bailout.

Meanwhile, experts are bracing for a “fourth wave” of infections in March and April, with the virus morphing into scarier versions of itself. People living in isolation are being pushed to the brink, now uncertain about we can and cannot do. So those of us who have been waiting in the freezer ever so cautiously allow ourselves to think about a future outside, while knowing the next couple of months could be as bad as any. We’re not sure what the rules are now, and we’re afraid to leave behind the rules we’ve already set for ourselves, because after all, they got us this far.

We’ve gotten used to the rules, but we’ve also gotten used to these sad little compressed lives that would have had family and friends intervening in any normal circumstances. We’ve adapted to the ambient grief of daily death tolls and the knowledge that to go out and do things is to be in danger. Adapted, but still paying the price for it, whether that’s bodily aches and minor injuries, or fight-or-flight responses fried to the point that once easily managed challenges have us losing sleep and snapping at our loved ones. As one of my friends who has been going through the pandemic solo in his apartment recently said to me, “It’s going to be a while before I know how much this year has messed me up.”

If you’re like me, as much as we’ve adapted, there’s also been a troubling wearing down of the barrier between our daily lives and awareness of the impending reality of death. The wall between the day to day and the catastrophic is still there, so most of us are able to get by and still have happy moments and accomplish some things. But it’s been ground thin, and I’m getting worried that it will be like that for some time. After setting it down several times, I recently finished Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti, which deals with questions about the lengths most of us go to deny death, an ultimately futile task. I keep thinking about this one part, a quote from Tolstoy in one of his darker moods:

They see neither the dragon that awaits them nor the mice gnawing the shrub by which they are hanging, and they lick the drops of honey. But they lick those drops of honey only for a while: Something will turn their attention to the dragon and the mice, and there will be an end to their licking.

I’m always ambivalent about this kind of pessimist philosophy, which feels to me about 60% truth and 40% Nine Inch Nails lyrics. After all, there’s still plenty of honey licking going on out there all the honey restaurants have been packed. What worries me more than the permanence of any psychic damage we’ve all incurred over the past year is the lack of lessons we’ve learned during the incursion.

I recently read an article, “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” by Ed Yong, one of the best science writers of our time, about what it is about America that caused us to fail so badly during COVID. “The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told Yong. He wrote it back in August—when the US had “just 4 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths”—so it’s still steeped in the Trump era and serves as a brutal indictment of the administration’s incompetence and cruelty. But he cites an abundance of factors, and while he notes that plenty of other countries made their own mistakes, ours give you the impression that that there is something deeply wrong with how the United States approaches many things, in public health and beyond.

Some of the problems are more systemic or technical, such as the ease with which social media allowed misinformation to spread, or the sprawling supply chains we rely on. Yong is concerned about the lack of trust in science and reason and a government that ignores expertise. But he also writes at length about how the country’s basic operating principles, at least in recent decades, have opened us up to mass death and suffering.

Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood.

He writes about our flawed approach to health care, which favors treating the individual instead of preventing sickness in the population, and “a national temperament that views health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.” Our profit-driven system means we spend twice as much of our wealth on health care, but have the lowest life-expectancy of comparable countries and the highest rates of chronic disease. The pandemic laid waste to populations we have systematically and intentionally turned our backs on. People were asked to sacrifice, and those who did got little in return from a hollowed out government.

Of course, so many simply refused to comply, unwilling to compromise any personal liberty for the public good, even if that meant many would die. Parents packed into school board meetings, screaming at low level elected officials that they would rather die than wear a mask, quoting Thomas Jefferson, comparing it to slavery.

Over the past year, I keep thinking about how you’ll sometimes hear people call certain aspects of the American status quo a “death cult,” whether that’s capitalism, or the Republican party, or the NRA, and I always think I don’t know that’s pretty extreme. But after this year, it feels like a charge that needs to be taken seriously. Because what is it about this country that makes us so unbelievably tolerant of the suffering of others, if there’s even a slight chance it might serve our own interests? What is so broken in a society that takes such shameful care of its sick and poor and old? That operates on a built in political assumption that only people with gainful employment deserve to live and be healthy?

Ed Yong, of course, does not call the US a death cult. He is very reasonable in his assessments and recommendations. But he does call COVID-19 “a referendum on the ideas that animate its culture. Recovery is possible, but it demands radical introspection.”

As we come out of the pandemic, god willing, I feel like the only way we’re going to properly recover and move forward with any sense of optimism and hope in the face of future health care crises and the cascading impacts of climate change is to interrogate far more than our health care. I don’t have some kind of grand thesis about what that entails, but it includes challenging some basic American principles, some of which are carried over from the 17th century, others that have spun horribly out of control in the past 10 years or so. At their core is this obsession with personal liberty and self-reliance that has become darkly cartoonish, out of step with the reality of living in any society, but also, serving every one of us so, so poorly. This zero-sum idea that whatever good fortune the individual has is earned and deserved, and if the bill for that good fortune is death or misery of other people, well that’s just the order of life, the cost of our prosperity. It is literally killing us.

Listening

The title of this week’s issue comes from a song by LA emo punk band Spanish Love Songs. This is not that song, but the themes are similar.

Watching

The Americans, season 3. I’ll probably do an issue on this show someday.

“Punks” is one of my favorite of the Jennings’ disguises.

Kind of a dark one this week, but hopefully that is maybe useful to you and not a complete drag. I try not to make these things therapy sessions but I do want to be emotionally honest with you people so we’re not sitting around all welp did you read the news today while all of our hair is on fire.

Don’t worry my hair is only partially on fire, still getting up every day, doing the thing, reading the books, reading the comics, playing the Zelda, taking stupid little walks on my treadmill. If you are having a similar experience these days, and I know everyone says this, but you really are not the only one. Do the stuff you need to do and if it takes you a while to return an email or a text seriously who gives a shit. Not me that’s for sure.

Tate

Links

Listening

Watching