Feeling Peevish

The waning days of winter are never my favorite time of year. I don’t particularly like winter and by now, with the sun stronger in the sky, with the scent of spring on the wind, I become down-right impatient for the turning of the year.

But this year, I am as testy as a hungry mother bear emerging from hibernation and COVID-19 is the reason. We have all been cooped up with no certainty of when—if ever—we can go anywhere again. By nature, I am a restless soul and I have to keep reminding myself that, no, I cannot travel; no, it would not be wise to go to see this friend or that relative; no, dining out might not be the best choice. It is all too boring.

But what makes me feel really peevish is the suspicion that much of this could have been avoided. Some estimates say that 130,000 people could have been saved during the pandemic if we had simply followed the instructions of public health experts.

Nevertheless, one year and more than 500,000 deaths later, masks and corona-related restrictions are still a political lightning rod. We have proved we are far from the Greatest Generation, refusing to pull together for a common good and making a Constitutional issue out of the inconvenience of putting on a mask in public.

At last week’s CPAC convention. Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, drew long applause when she boasted she had never ordered a “single business or church to close” and got more cheers when she dismissed infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, as being “wrong a lot.” Overlooked was the fact that by failing to close down or to restrain gatherings—including the super-spreader Sturgis motorcycle rally—her state suffered the country’s eighth-highest death rate from COVID-19, despite its wide-open spaces and prairie breezes.

So, why this inflexibility? Why would folks rather die than comply? And why this distain for the rights of other citizens who might be made ill, even die, as a result a stubborn refusal by some to wear a mask?

There would be no human race as we know it if we had not evolved as cooperative animals. We are pretty ill-equipped for survival—we have no thick fur to protect against cold or sunburn, no claws or fangs for hunting and protection, are neither fast runners nor terrific swimmers. An individual human has few natural survival tools except a large brain and opposable thumb.

But today, with the unnatural conveniences of modern living, our interdependence has been diminished. Much has been made during the pandemic of the devastating isolation people feel but the trend started long before the virus, a zombie of the natural work—neither alive nor dead—manifested itself.

A survey published in Personality and Social Psychology Review revealed that levels of empathy among American students fell by 48 percent between 1979 and 2009 in part because increasingly we prefer the “digital echo chamber” of social media to rubbing elbows with others who may not reflect our precise attitudes. The Global Risks Report 2019, published by the World Economic Forum in partnership with Zurich Insurance Group, reports that social media does, indeed, produce empathetic responses but at levels six times weaker than those produced by real-world interactions. The article asks, “But at what point does increasing isolation and the decline in empathy morph into a social risk?”

I would suggest that it already has. Wear your mask, wash your hands. How much simpler can you get? And yet a large segment of the population has treated this as an abridgment of its constitutional rights. Their right to not be inconvenienced supersedes any concern about the very real health risks to others. The reaction is out of sync with the rest of their membership in the human race. They claim that the state cannot mandate wearing masks but happily comply with restrictions such as driving on the correct side of the road to avoid vehicular mayhem.

Freedom without any social responsibility or empathy for others is ultimately hollow. Constitutional scholars and a number of courts have rejected the claims that mandating masks removes their right to free speech (it might be a bit muffled but you can still say what you want), religion, assembly and other claims. As John E. Finn, professor emeritus of Government at Wesleyan University, wrote in an article published on The Conversation, “… (C)onstitutional rights—whether to liberty, speech, assembly, freedom of movement or autonomy—are held on several conditions. The most basic and important of these conditions is that our exercise of rights must not endanger others (and in so doing violate their rights) or the public welfare. …”

We now seem to be rounding the corner on the pandemic and there is hope that we can return to some normality by the end of summer. But to do that, we need to quickly reach herd immunity to stop the unfettered spread of the disease. Experts estimate that herd immunity would require 80 to 90 percent of the population to have COVID-19 immunity, either through prior infection or vaccination. The “often wrong” Fauci has explained that stopping the rapid spread of the disease will also reduce its ability to mutate and become even deadlier—a worthy goal in my mind.

But the Kaiser Family Foundation publication, COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor, found that at the beginning of March only 55 percent of Americans want to get vaccinated as soon as they can or have already been vaccinated. Admittedly, that's higher than the 47 percent of the public who said they wanted to get the vaccine in December or the 34 percent in December but still falls far short of the level of compliance needed to get us out of this mess.

The growing acceptance of the vaccine is encouraging and maybe by the time it is readily available to all, everyone will be rolling up his or her sleeve to become protected. Meanwhile I am feeling peevish about one other aspect of the pandemic—the difficulty of getting an appointment and the data that is collected by some agencies.

The rush to get appointments has made the process frustrating and tedious and, while methods vary from agency to agency, I seriously question why I had to answer questions about my ethnicity, sexual orientation (right down my gender identity) and religion. The disease does not care if I am Christian, Muslim or atheist; straight, gay or trans. Just give me the vaccine!

I am hopeful that we can achieve a level of herd immunity this year that strips COVID-19 of its ability to divide a world that was already fragmenting over so many issues. In the end, though, the real challenge may lie in rediscovering the empathy and compassion that allows us to work for the benefit of all rather than braying about our individual rights.