As Catherine Rampell noted this week in a column in The Washington Post: “At least four states - Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee - have recently extended benefits to workers who are fired or quit over their employers’ vaccine requirements. Some Republican governors are just about venerating the unvaccinated. Some Republicans in Congress have threatened a government shutdown to prevent any federal funding of President Biden’s vaccine-and-testing mandate for large employers. And Republican leaders have gone from indulging to encouraging that mind-set, which is often just selfishness costumed as liberty. One town’s irresponsibility is an entire state’s economy.Īnd yet I’ve heard as much crowing and ranting about individualism as at any other point in my American life. One person’s recklessness is a dozen people’s possible sickness. This historic pandemic came with urgent reminders and remonstrations about our individual and communal lives, but we haven’t heeded them to the degree that we should have, grown from them to the extent that we might have, wrung the fullest possible good from all the bad.Īt the outset and ever since, the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated our interconnectedness, in terms of not just how much each of us needs from others but also how much our actions affect everybody else. There are teachable moments and teachable epochs, and since the beginning of 2020, we’ve been slogging and teetering through the latter. And for me, that’s sometimes the most frustrating part of all.
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We’ve let many key lessons of this pandemic go to waste. We’re supposed to live in ambiguity, that’s what. I want to know when I can make travel plans without first making intricate assessments of risk, when I can stop ordering masks in bulk, when I can rip off the one through which I strain to be heard by the students I teach, when I can breathe free.Īnd my initial reaction to the coverage last weekend of Omicron - another new strain, another head-scratching and soul-abrading expansion of our medical vocabularies - was a quiet version of the louder rage that I heard in comments from people all around me: How dare we be warned that there’s a potentially grave new threat without being told just how grave it is? What kind of epidemiological sadism is that? And what the hell are we supposed to do with it? As we approach the two-year mark since “coronavirus” became a household word, I get the frustration, the impatience, the exhaustion.