Good Faith, Bad Faith

When some random stranger decides not to get vaccinated against COVID for less than rock solid reasons,  any response that strikes your fancy seems appropriate (even those that are provoked out of less than rock solid motivations).  When the person is not random or a stranger, the question of what is appropriate has to be taken more seriously.  I had occasion to ponder the appropriateness of a response recently when I found myself conversing at an outdoor gathering with the daughter of family friends whom I hadn't seen in a while.  A lot had happened to her since our last conversation-- pregnancy, marriage, conversion to a particularly fiery brand of Christianity.  She first entered our lives fresh from a Russian orphanage when she and her brother were adopted as young children by our friends a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Though she was raised in a very East Coast American urban secular way, the way she spoke about her relationship with Jesus was very reminiscent of the memories I have of my most ancient immigrant female relatives from childhood.  I wanted to ascribe her evangelism to genes, but I remind myself that she and her brother were not infants when they were adopted, so her full throttle embrace of Christianity could well be a rediscovery of what could have been for a very small child who finds herself in a Russian orphanage a necessary wellspring of strength.  Facing the challenges of special circumstances, let alone of young adulthood at the end of history, it was certainly that for her now. 

Always a bit of an unfiltered open book (bless her heart), she brought it up.  She had probed me first, to see if by any luck I was a brother in Christ, and when that turned out not to be the case, to be sure I wasn't too in the pocket of Satan.  Satisfied that I was benign at worst, she confessed to being unvaccinated and explained that it was her decision to trust in Jesus above the vaccine.  She admitted that she was equally afraid of taking the vaccine, given her pregnancy and her distrust of the medical establishment based on some bad experiences with it, and of not taking it.  To her mind, both were equally dangerous propositions, likely to give her and her unborn daughter lethal cases of COVID.  Even so she was determined to forgo the vaccine and let Jesus handle it (she pointed to the sky as she said this).  This was causing her agony as she was getting grief for it from the vaccine friendly world of her parents (my world) as well as from the Jesus centric world of her husband for entertaining doubt about the power of Jesus.

My first instinct when a grown up person is talking to me directly is to outwardly respect their viewpoint  regardless of what's going on with me inwardly.  If I have a relationship or history with the person, especially if it's a younger person, I'm inclined to accept their agency in their own life.  But for some reason it occurred to me that since there was an opening for being reasoned with about the vaccine-- which her obstetrician after all was urging her to take-- I could at least voice support for the safeguard of getting it.  As I debated the wisdom of this, I thought to myself, "what if your words make the difference?"

I wanted to remind her (for she had surely heard everything) that millions of people had taken the vaccine by now, and that it has had demonstrable results in preventing the spread and in diminishing the effects of the virus for those who have contracted the Delta variant of it.  I said, why not get the vaccine and put an end to your agony over it?  She countered that as a person with some rheumatoid arthritis she would have to get periodic booster shots.  What's more there would be other variants-- the spiral of vaccination was potentially never ending.   Better to let Jesus inoculate you for good.   But the Delta variant is much more contagious.  Wasn't she afraid of being around so many unvaccinated people?  Everyone she knew was vaccinated, she said, even her husband who was opposed to it on religious grounds but whose workplace required it.  By her being out on a limb with it, her circle had created a bubble of immunity around her.  But what about those outside her circle in her church?  Weren't they potential sources of the disease that her lack of immunity would make her vulnerable to? She preferred to put her faith in Jesus rather than the vaccine.  Having gone down the road I had to say it: Was that not an unfair burden being placed on Jesus? What if in spite of her faith, she got COVID because she didn't get vaccinated.  She could pass it on to others including those she loved.  I could not bring myself to say out loud the implications-- would it mean Jesus failed?  Or would it mean that she had failed to get Jesus's protection?  Was there not some religious obligation to not put Jesus in that position?  But of course the ability to ask the question is a demonstration of one's lack of understanding of faith.  Still, it was clear from her response that she was in agony over the possibility.

In the end,  as it turned out, I had not pushed her over the line on vaccination.  But it was also certainly true that I would not be the last person to proffer an opinion on her choice, and her heart was far from at ease on the question.

Her posture is very familiar to me.  You make a decision-- to keep smoking; to quit school or a job; to get back with someone no one thinks is good for you; to associate with bad elements-- for possibly less than stellar reasons -- fear; stubbornness; weak but compelling issues of character or principle or desire for belief; simple willfulness; to be blunt, bad faith and rationalizations-- and the tenuousness of it guarantees that it remains unsettled and that you'll have to explain yourself perpetually to every schmo who wants a crack at knocking sense into you.  The truth is, the decision is made.  It may be an objectively bad decision, but there will be no going back on it, because it has been decided.  If it is wrong and you pay for it and live, it will be a lesson.  But what if, by luck or by some miracle it turns out as you hope and pray it will, to be right? 

What could I do but wish her the best?

Object Impermanence

Recently,  I was asked by my wife to empty drawers in a chest that I hadn't used in years to make room for some of her things.  Once an integral part of my life, the drawers of clothing and odds and ends -- socks, underwear, barely used tee shirts, shorts and jeans, handkerchiefs, a non-functional pocket watch, heirloom cufflinks in case they ever came in handy, small miscellaneous trinkets,  old wallets, expired checks and credit cards and most exotically of all an old jewelry box containing 3 vintage bullets of assorted calibers, almost certainly my father's originally, which I suppose had somehow been shunted to me in the division of his effects following his death -- had fallen out of use due to a long series of micro-evolutions in my daily routine that had migrated the storage and retrieval of most of my day to day wardrobe and accoutrements to the vicinity of the laundry room; it had gotten to the point that the old drawers had sat idle for much more than a decade,  pushing two.  In fact, until my wife asked me if  I could see my way clear to bequeath them to her I'd forgotten about them.  The request felt burdensome at first, and I put it off, but when procrastination was no longer an option, I experienced it as something of an excavation, even a journey back in time to visit a younger, thinner, more vital version of myself.   Scanning the memory hole for what had happened to that person, I drew a blank.  There was no trauma, no revolution, no ceremony or innovation, no abolition or  transmogrification.  To all evidence, that person seems to have systematically undetectably been assumed by this one.  Alas.  I couldn't have known then that my future was not going to be one that would ever involve a need for cufflinks. 

The errand came at the end of a long weekend visit to the camp of some friends from the dawn of our adult lives, whom we hadn't seen in a few years.  I had a nice time, but I had to admit had it not been for my wife who arranged the trip, I probably could have gone the rest of my days without seeing them.  It has nothing to do with them for they are lovely people, but I recognize in myself a sort of growing indifference to people and places that are not immediately in front of my face.  My  workplace, for instance-- I haven't set foot in the building for almost exactly 17 months and I can't visualize what it looks like and have not the curiosity to care to refresh my memory.  The same goes for travel to places I've once loved or never been but once wanted desperately to see-- I was reminded in one of those drawers I cleaned out of an extinguished wanderlust by a small collection of tourist maps that I'm sure were acquired aspirationally in that former life that it turns out simply had to be relocated with everything else to make room for things my wife actually uses today.  I'm not sure if you gave me two plane tickets and all-expenses-paid accommodations to any of those places for travel tomorrow I'd know what to do with them. 

Is something wrong with me?  As long as I have people and instruments at hand that put the distractions and abstractions that keep me enthralled and occasionally involved in the project of living, I don't really care, but it might be good to know.

That younger self... When I was younger, it seemed to me that the United States was fundamentally, constitutionally, at core a nobly constructed entity.  School taught me that it was structured as a continuing project, progressing as it should "in order to form a more perfect union."  The structure involved the checks and balances of a set of 3 competing and complementary branches-- an executive that presided over things, setting the tone and enforcing laws, a legislative that set the laws and approved or disapproved of the executive's actions, subject and answerable as the executive was to public approbation in the form of regular elections by those they represented; and a judicial branch whose members, selected for their wisdom and acumen could wield their power as they saw fit thanks to the shield of permanent appointment to their office.  My younger self through over-exposure to the vagaries, excesses and severe disappointments of neoliberal politics in the 80s and 90s was turned apolitical for his sanity's sake*, but this was only possible because of an enduring belief-- if I'm honest, a faith-- that thanks to the ingeniousness of its design, left to its own devices the more perfect union would ultimately prevail.   Boy was he naive.  What was he doing instead?  Contributing to it.

As for the items from the drawer, they got dispersed.  What wasn't sensible or ethically suitable to pass on went on the trash pile or got punted to other repositories in other corners of the house to be re-encountered in future reorganizations-- I hope I'll figure out by then how to dispose of bullets without harm-- but most were boxed up and deposited at a nearby thrift store donation center.  They're someone else's burden now.

~~~~~

* The return of insanity on my re-engagement in politics demonstrates the wisdom of that strategy.

Let us atheist pray

Dear void which are not in heaven: I heard recently that the situation with respect to global warming is even worse than feared, as our daily experience with the news and weather-- and even sports and traffic-- confirm.  I am led to understand it's not just bad, it is very likely given the current trajectory of both our political climate and our actual one that it is very quickly going to get much worse.  We're having a hard enough time with the actual covid threat in front of our face-- how can anyone expect us to deal, o void, with this existential one that we have long known was coming but have done nothing about?  It seems as though a predicament of such immensity would call for some cooperation amongst us in recognition of our shared circumstances and stakes in the outcome, and yet even the fragments we have broken down into are further fragmenting by the day.  What to do, o void which are not?

I atheist pray that we collectively come to our senses, get on the stick, get on the ball, hop to it before say, fall.  For starters, could we not get a bit more camaraderie on the left?  Could we have much less virtue policing and purity tests and cancellation and infighting and Robespierre moves and a bit more recognition of the benefit of alliance, growth and momentum where it's always needed, on the left where trouble of the most urgent kind always originates?

As long as I'm shouting into the darkness, I might as well pray for wisdom for our elected leaders.  And not political wisdom, but actual experiential wisdom that could be put to service in coordinating a response to our present predicament in such a way as not to favor one group over another but which will bring about an era of sustainable copaceticism far into the future.  May whatever foundation of common interest be strengthened within them and may it be joined by a far-reaching imagination about what is possible that is also actually good-- universal healthcare and an alternative to soulless, corrosive, dead-end capitalism, for instance.

And please may the laws of physics change in some benign way that will nullify privatized, commercialized space technology.

Judgment Day and karma don't make logical sense to me, void.  If their purpose is to incentivize justness in this realm, would it not advantage them to be meted in this realm?   Justice delayed is justice denied.  As much as the science which gives credence to thee, the lameness of two such famous schemes as these also does service to the wisdom of belief on you instead, o void.  Therefore, I atheist pray that the class of people responsible for the impending doom soon begin to feel consequences for their actions and inactions and for the rigid stratifications that they maintain through economic stinginess, weakening them apparently enough that their class can be approached and dismantled, creating the opening for an epoch of transnational communal effort toward a restoration of the planet for all of its creatures.

Finally I ask for health and well-being for my loved ones and if you can spare another favor for myself, an end to my writer's block.  And also a pet koala.

Hear me now, o void (if indeed thou couldst be imagined to have ears with which to hear me).  Thou art great, and I am nothing.  But I implore you: Please do everything in your non-existent power to get it together. Wouldst thou please, void?  (Hello?)

Ready for Anything

To give an indication of how I’m doing, this imagined conversation occurred to me on my way here (Assume Person B is a truthful person):

Person A: Are you ready for anything?

Person B: No.

Person A: Are you ready for anything?

Person B: Yes.

In the first instance of the question, ready-for-anything is an adjective.  Answering in the affirmative requires Person B to feel prepared for any eventuality-- Anything stands in for every conceivable possibility.  Person B knows there are very certainly situations that she is not prepared for, and being a truthful sort, answers in the negative.  In the second instance, ready is alone an adjective and “for anything” adverbially modifies it.  In this case, any stands in only for the at least one case for which person B feels prepared.  She is at least prepared to answer this question, so she answers in the affirmative.  The above dialogue with stage directions:

Person A (cheerfully and optimistically): Are you ready for anything?

Person B: No.

Person A:  (quizzically) Are you ready for anything?

Person B: Yes.

So, to your question about how I’m doing, in the extremely unlikely event that my boss asks me in my meeting this morning if I’m ready for anything, I am now prepared to say Yes.