Together Apart

Technically I am still on Work From Home until the middle of August, but lately more and more I have been having to go into the office to do things and today I will head in and be there all day. The particulars are unimportant, but I will be around what feels like a lot of people throughout the day. I’m vaccinated and they are all vaccinated, everybody will be wearing masks, socially distanced, all the things. 

It’s strange the way that this country is coming back on line. I live in California and as of June 15th all of the Quarantine measures are basically gone. That is different in workplaces and some other places, but out there in the world, all bets are off. I went to Target on June 16th and I was still wearing a mask because I honestly just didn’t think about it when I got out of the car. Putting on the mask is just part of the routine now, you know?

In the store people were mostly still wearing masks, except for white men. White men were just all like, “Fuck your feelings.”

I am a white man and man, I gotta tell you, most of the time I feel like I’m adopted.

I don’t wear baseball caps or watch football or go in for libertarianism or gun ownership or the KKK. I know that I am infected with that toxic white masculinity that you hear so much about and sometimes it still comes out even though it is something that I work on. And keep in mind, I have basically three English degrees. You know how much of my life I have spent reading and thinking about Critical Theory? You know how much time I have devoted to figuring out what my brain is doing and why? I’ve said to people before that I am still running 20th Century white American male software no matter how many fixes and updates I try to install.

And yet, walking into Target the other day and looking at these pale baseball cap wearing football dudes, I was all like, “Do you not see how much of an asshole you look like, dude?”

Look, I get it, these are MAYBE vaccinated and so not actually doing anything illegal, but I think that the thing that has so completely shaken my faith in humanity over the last 15 months has been discovering how many people (sometimes people close to me) just lack actual human empathy. We are members of a society and that means we have obligations to one another, which means that we are all supposed to give a damn about other people. 

So maybe read the room, my dudes. We have all experienced trauma since this virus thing started, but we have not all experienced the exact same trauma and we certainly have not experienced it collectively. We should have though, but we didn’t navigate it that way. That’s what the “Together Apart” slogan was supposed to be about, but that was a slogan, not a description of what we did.

I’ve really been shaken the last 15 months about the way people behaved, especially since it was so clear that the solution was so simple: choose to care about other people and then make all of your pandemic decisions downstream of that.

As our society comes back to life, I don’t know what the next few months are going to feel like, especially once we start getting pocket spikes among people who have refused to get vaccinated. I fear we are going to be stretched even further apart. People are still dying in this country, but now there is even less that any one of us can do about that individually.

Vaccine Summer is going to be fantastic for some of us, but terrible for others. 

The worst parts of this may be behind us, but this next part is still going to be weird.

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