The selective anger toward only one group among the several that are refusing vaccines is boringly opportunistic.
The selective anger toward only one group among the several that are refusing vaccines is boringly opportunistic.
‘ Anger,” writes guest essayist Sarah Smarsh in the New York Times, “is a contagious energy that jumps quickly from one person to the next. It will seize your mind and body as its host. If allowed to explode, it will hurt others.”
Smarsh is a progressive living in Kansas who is herself really angry with people who don’t wear masks enough: “By many accounts an amiable person, I once yelled at a truck stop full of unmasked people to read the sign on the goddamn door.” Perhaps she should avoid truck stops rather than raging at people whose risk tolerance differs from hers. Perhaps she should avoid a lot of places. I’m sitting in a Pret à Manger in Manhattan where practically no one is wearing a mask.
I thank Smarsh for her candor, and for her attempts to manage her hissy fits. But alas, the Left’s anger has already exploded. I have learned this by reading what the Left has to say. “Feelings of anger, frustration, fear, and disappointment that have been simmering for months are now boiling over,” Rolling Stone tells us in a piece whose headline claims that the Delta variant’s “Sudden Doom Effect” is “Making Us Snap” and follows up, nonsensically, with this subheadline: “We’ve tried being resilient. We’ve tried having rational conversations with friends and family members about the importance of vaccines and face masks. We are long out of f–ks to give. Now what?”
(Note to Rolling Stone editors: when you don’t give a f–k, it means you don’t care, not that you care very, very much. Also, if you’re trying to be resilient, you don’t seem to be trying very hard.)
The underlying story by Elizabeth Yuko sketches one rageful hysteric after another. Each is vaccinated and none explains why a vaccinated person should be concerned, much less worried, much less angry, about his neighbor’s vaccination choices when his own chance of developing a serious COVID illness is less than .01 percent. It’s as if all of these vaccinated people who are incensed with unvaccinated people for not understanding the importance of vaccines have themselves forgotten that the reason vaccines are important is that they work.
In a classic tear-your-hair-out piece, a Virginia mom who claims her “adult children are all COVID deniers” asserts that she has “lost all hope for humanity” because of this. A wedding photographer in Colorado notes that several of her friendships are in jeopardy, which means she is dumping friends for either not being vaccinated or not wearing masks. Yuko breathlessly asserts, “We’re in the midst of the next wave of the Covid mental health crisis,” by which she means that irrational people are choosing to go crazy.
A WebMD piece headlined, “As COVID Resurges, Vaccinated Americans Rage Against Holdouts,” quotes an Ohio lawyer as saying, “I am angry, I am resentful, and I think it’s a fair and appropriate response . . . I did everything I was supposed to do. Yet here we are, 16, 17 months later, and it feels like we’re in the exact same place we were last summer, and it’s all because some people refuse to do the responsible things they were told to do.”
No. Wrong. Incorrect. We’re in a very different place compared with last summer because this lawyer, along with more than 70 percent of adult Americans, has been vaccinated. How do so many protected people manage to keep their rage hormones flowing at others who aren’t protected? Smarsh quotes a Twitter user as saying, “I’ve been pissed off since Reagan was elected.” That sounds like a more compelling explanation, or confession.
Those of us on the right who have been told, at least going back to Barry Goldwater, that we are the country’s rage caucus are saying today: Please calm down. It’ll be all right. But if you can’t handle a situation that’s 99.99 percent safe, that’s your problem, not the nation’s.
Smarsh is, like virtually all of the other raging Democrats we are hearing from these days, fully vaccinated. So am I, which is why I don’t feel much in danger. I live in a city of 8 million people of whom large swathes are unvaccinated. Only 32 percent of black New Yorkers are fully vaccinated, for instance (as against 72 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders).
By the logic of the progressives Smarsh writes about who refer to rural Americans as “spreadnecks,” I should feel the same kind of rage at unvaccinated black New Yorkers as the Left does at rural unvaccinated whites. I decline to do so. I suppose Ms. Smarsh’s logic would be, “Wait a minute, that’s different. It’s white people’s fault that black people are opting out of the vaccine.” But I decline to believe that also.
Rarely do the media even attempt to answer the question of why black people are opting not to get the vaccine, but when reporters do so, they’re invariably patronizing. Starting from the assumption that black people lack agency, or are incapable of booking an appointment online, they produce stories such as this Washington Post effort. “It’s like with anything else. People who have means and resources, who in Philadelphia tend to be more White, are the ones who are able to game the system better,” James Garrow, a spokesman for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, told the Post. Game the system? You can barely step outside your house without being offered a vaccine. There’s no special white-knowledge samizdat on how to get the shot. “It’s a problem with access,” progressives cry.
No, it isn’t. Black people are aware that vaccines are available. In most cases they’re simply choosing not to get them. Here in New York City, we’re awash in vaccines, the publicity campaign to inform people about them dwarfs that of any blockbuster movie, and there are incentives attached to getting them. The vast majority of black New Yorkers belong to a political party that is ardently pushing vaccines.
Most of them are declining to go along with the program for various reasons: they don’t feel at risk, they fear the side effects, they are wary of potential long-term side effects, they’re suspicious of claims made by institutions, they’re waiting for full approval from the FDA.
The same reasons, in other words, that rural Fox News Channel fans cite for not getting the vaccine. So why hate one group and not the other? More to the point, why hate . . . anybody, if you’re vaccinated? Neither unvaccinated black people in my city nor unvaccinated white people who watch Tucker Carlson pose a threat to me. I am well-protected. I didn’t say I’m bulletproof. I could still die of the virus, just as I could die in a car accident, or be murdered, or drop dead of a heart attack. The virus is now just one of many background risks I face each day. It wouldn’t register in my mind at all if it weren’t for all of the hysteria around me.
Philip Bump of the Washington Post complains that what I’m saying is whataboutism: “Don’t blame us, blame Black people is certainly a rhetorical choice one might make,” he writes. Why would “unvaccinated us” and “unvaccinated black people” be in two separate groups, though? If you’re angry with one group, shouldn’t you be angry with both?
No, says Bump, you should be angry only with white Republican anti-vaxxers, because “Black people are much less likely than Republicans to say that they refuse to be vaccinated” (So what? They actually are refusing to be vaccinated, no matter what they tell pollsters), because there are a lot more white Republicans than blacks who refuse to get vaccinated (which is just another way of saying blacks are a minority, but the point is irrelevant; Bump wouldn’t hesitate to criticize the tiny minority of Americans who refuse vaccines and go to motorbike rallies in Sturgis), and anyway blacks are “a historically disadvantaged group.”
Check and mate, thinks Bump. Bump is asserting that no black person can be blamed for any unwise decision he makes in 2021 because of Jim Crow. This is infantilization. It suggests that black people can’t be held responsible in 2021, or presumably ever, because of history, which can’t be changed.
The selective rage of the Bumpian Left with only one group among the several that are refusing vaccines is boringly opportunistic. So the Left hates white conservatives; what else is new? If this group were the most vaccinated demographic, they’d be venting their rage for some other reason. Pissed off since Reagan.
The pandemic doesn’t end until we have herd immunity — until nearly everyone has antibodies, either from infection or the vaccine. People who reject the latter are leaving themselves open to the former, but if that’s their choice, my reaction is not a howl of anguish. It’s a shrug of indifference. I invite progressives to consider the matter rationally, shed their anger, and return to living life to the fullest. Unless they find rage to be more enjoyable, and I’m afraid they do.