Trying Times for Optimists

We’ve been at this for 18 months now, this COVID thing. I can hardly remember what life was like before. The virus seems to have changed everything, serving as the catalyst for the ascension of madness in our world. It is the single greatest dividing point in society, having vanquished even Donald Trump, who actually got booed for suggesting that people get vaccinated at one of his recent rallies. The United States of America has jumped the shark.

Here’s how it goes. Normal, well educated people come to wildly opposing conclusions about…literally everything having to do with COVID-19. Someone posts a chart that says that 95% of current hospitalizations for COVID-19 are of the unvaccinated. Someone else then claims that the chart is rigged by lying doctors and hospitals who are making up the admissions data out of ulterior motives like money or pressure from their superiors. So the rest of us are left to try and decide who we chose to believe…the chart or the alleged crooked doctors and hospital administrators. If we side with the chart we are assumed to be liberty-hating authoritarians. If we believe that the vast majority of public health officials across the country are all in on some kind of giant information conspiracy we are left with the obvious conclusion that we are living in the last days. When a conspiracy comes along powerful enough to persuade the nation’s doctors—a notoriously prickly and independent lot—to falsify admissions records in masse, can anything stop it??

Wearing a mask helps stop the spread of the virus.

No it doesn’t. It is simply a tool to enslave us.

The vaccine is enormously effective in not only preventing getting the virus, but also lessening the severity of the symptoms if you do get it.

No. The vaccine is worthless and could possibly contain microbes designed to manipulate the brain, making us more susceptible to mind control.

Wearing a mask is an act of selflessness and a form of respect for the most vulnerable around us.

No. Wearing a mask is a virtue signaling pose by people who want to feel morally superior to everyone else.

It is virtually impossible to find a common ground between these two schools of thought. Where would the point of agreement come between these two world views? I can’t imagine where…and this is why I have never been so discouraged about the state of public discourse in my 63 years.

I am at heart an optimist. When I contemplate the future I tend to think of innovation, progress, and opportunity. It is my belief that the arc of history bends decidedly towards those three things. I mean, 100 years ago the number one cause of death in America was diarrhea, people. The progress we have made in quality of life measures is astonishing and unprecedented. So, I have great reason for optimism. But it is becoming more difficult with each passing day to imagine how the great COVID-divide gets bridged…that doesn’t involve an awful lot of death.