What Comes After is Based on What We Choose
Roy Scranton writes in this morning’s New York Times, “Now, as a new administration takes office and we look ahead to life after both Covid and Donald Trump, we need to face the fact that the world we live in is changing into something else, and that coping with the consequences of global warming demands immediate, widespread, radical action.”
I put the bold on the words above. Life after both Covid and Donald Trump … we’re all longing for it. One of these conditions is already—well, sort of—in place.
A neutral, international tech tribunal is considering even now whether to make Trump’s banishment from Facebook permanent or temporary. We ought to know by April. Between us, the relative silence has been golden.
It’s also allowed us to begin to hear the ongoing rumbling as Parler has died—thanks, Amazon—, Twitter has banned Trump for life, and Facebook faces its own deliberations. Google has a part in the silence and the rumbling as well. More and more of us are aware of the continual planning and scheming of right-wingers, Christian nationalists, QAnonsensers, and white supremacists to overthrow the government and create as much havoc, death, and destruction in the process as humanly possible.
Adama Bah is an immigration activist. She has a video in this morning’s Times. “We Don’t Need Another War on Terror,” proclaims her headline. She recommends that we “prosecute the Capitol rioters” and warns that “new antiterrorism laws could end up targeting people of color.”
I wanted to rewrite her headline:
We Don’t Need Another War.
Period.
Of any kind.
In any place.
Against anyone.
Ever Again.
Despite the fact that Jackson Reffitt was warned explicitly by his father that “traitors are shot,” he warned the F.B.I. about the “big plans” his father, a Texas Three Percenter, was going on about weeks before the assault on The Capitol.
“As for others grappling with whether to come forward about someone they believe could be involved in something dangerous, he said, ‘You’re not just protecting yourself, but you’re protecting them as well. I put my emotions behind me to do what I thought was right,’ Mr. Reffitt said of reporting his father. And though he does not regret his decision, ‘He’s still family, and it’s still weird.’”
It is, Jackson, and bravo. You did the right thing. What I’m wondering this morning is if the rest of us will make the same choice. We don’t need any wars anymore, Beloved. We need plans, agreements, action steps that reflect our real choices about going into a life after Covid, at the very least.
Covid itself really isn’t playing nice. Here are Gail Collins and Bret Stephens in their weekly Opinion conversation. They express our conundrum at this precise moment so well.
“Gail: It’s true that the virus overshadows everything. Most of my conversations with friends seem to begin with ‘Have you gotten the vaccine yet?’”
FWIW, New Orleans has developed a Mardi Gras-themed public service ad campaign called “Sleeves Up, NOLA!” to encourage vaccination. The key to its appeal is how personal to NOLA it is. We all need personal reasons for what we do, even, I daresay, personal benefits. Otherwise, we aren’t motivated. Back to Gail a moment,
“Gail: Once again I’m torn between passion and practicality. I so, so, so want to see Trump convicted, barred from politics forever and placed firmly on the bottom rung of the American presidency.
“Bret: He’s there already, as the political equivalent of Richard Nixon’s footstool, Herbert Hoover’s bath slippers, and James Buchanan’s spittoon.”
I was pleased to see Bret being unequivocal for once, but Gail expresses where we are right now in a nutshell. Listen.
“Gail: I guess if I had to flat-out choose, I’d put fighting Covid and fixing the economy above further humiliation and denigration for Trump. But it certainly wouldn’t satisfy me emotionally.”
And this is why both individual and collective manifestation is so very hard, Beloved. We want things, of course, but so often we want conflicting things. Note her language construction: If I had to choose ….” Well, sorry to inform you if this is new information, but we do have to choose—well, really, no, get to choose. In fact, it could be argued that all of life on Planet Earth is about choices.
National hero Dr. Anthony Fauci was interviewed in The Times this morning about what it was really like to work for Donald Trump. All I can say is, OMG, that guy is elegant.
NYT: “Did you ever think about quitting?
AF: “Never. Never. Nope.
NYT: “Weren’t you concerned that you would be blamed for the failures if you didn’t resign?”
AF: “When people just see you standing up there, they sometimes think you’re being complicit in the distortions emanating from the stage. But I felt that if I stepped down, that would leave a void. Someone’s got to not be afraid to speak out the truth. They would try to play down real problems and have a little happy talk about how things are OK. And I would always say, ‘Wait a minute, hold it folks, this is serious business.’ So there was a joke—a friendly joke, you know—that I was the skunk at the picnic. …
“I always felt that if I did walk away, the skunk at the picnic would no longer be at the picnic. Even if I wasn’t very effective in changing everybody’s minds, the idea that they knew that nonsense could not be spouted without my pushing back on it, I felt was important. I think in the big picture, I felt it would be better for the country and better for the cause for me to stay, as opposed to walk away.”
Dr. Fauci could have resigned. He could have. And he would have been not only totally within his rights, but justified in doing it. He took public humiliation and abuse day after day in front of cameras. The man’s 80. He didn’t have to do that, but he did. He chose to stay, not for himself, but for us. Just like Jackson Reffitt, he did the right thing, the hard thing.
He’s still doing the right thing in the face of these virus variants, standing before all of us, and telling the truth, even in the faces of a lot of us really not wanting to hear it or take his recommendations. He’s doing it anyway. That’s a hero. A real hero.
Roy Scranton is the director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative. He’s also a veteran. “As the pandemic has worn on, the desire to get back to normal has increased, and I worry that the hope for radical positive change has subsided. But we must not let it dissipate. We can’t afford to. Because we won’t see ‘normal’ again in our lifetimes.”
Mr. Scranton is not a doomsayer, Beloved, he’s a pragmatist. Just like Dr. Fauci. We ignore that the world has changed, and that we must change with it, at our own dramatic peril.
Here’s a veteran’s insight into Iraq. “What I saw in Iraq was that every time you shock the system, something breaks. Sometimes those breaks never heal. There’s no way we can undo the damage we did to Iraq or bring back the lives lost to Covid. But sometimes those breaks are openings. Sometimes those breaks are opportunities to do things differently.
“In March last year, watching an unknown plague stalk the land, I felt fear, but I also felt hope: the hope that this virus, as horrible as it might be, could also give us the chance to really understand and internalize the fragility and transience of our collective existence. I hoped we might recognize not only that fossil-fuel-driven consumer capitalism was likely to destroy everything we loved, but that we might actually be able to do something about it.”
Actually, if we can all just agree on the facts … um, climate change is real. Not only that, but it’s a real and present danger. If we can all agree to follow the national and international lead of Mr. Biden’s administration, we are poised on the brink of doing something about it.
We must allow the law to work until its logical conclusion over those who would overthrow our country in an effort to go back to a way of life that has been frozen in collective memory, and is not really accurate. That life when white men were in charge of everything. To be completely honest, they’ve made rather a hash of things so far.
Kevin Berrill from Chevy Chase, Md. writes a letter to the editor this morning. “Re ‘Trump Ignites a War Within the Church’ (column, Jan. 15):
“As David Brooks observes, people of faith who support Donald Trump are at a crossroads. Some are waking up to the fact that their political savior is a false prophet who must be repudiated. The rest are lost in a desert worshiping a golden calf of their own making.
“Perhaps in Mr. Trump’s gilded reflection, they can still imagine their dreams fulfilled, or feel strong or righteous. But in casting their lot with Mr. Trump, these Christians have strayed into a moral wilderness. They nearly took the country with them.”
It’s a valid warning, Beloved. We ignore it, and Covid, and climate change, and Donald Trump, and white supremacy, and systemic racism, to name but a few, at our own peril.
The day after The Inauguration, The Times ran an article about something my partner and I noticed about the ceremony. I’m sure you did as well. It had to do with how we are wearing our masks.
James Gorman writes, “I realized it’s not a Democratic thing. Or a Republican thing. Or an inaugural thing. It’s a male thing. It’s like manspreading, but with masks. Call it manslipping.
“Also, I don’t want to be picky and focus on reality, but you can breathe through a mask. It’s not as pleasant as breathing without a mask. And you may feel that you deserve more air than you are getting, or that, like a subway seat or the wide-open prairie, the air is a place for a man to stretch out and breathe free.”
“I am left with the conclusion that man slippage is like manspreading. We—some of us—do it because we are, well, men. And you know what men are like.”
We do. Men like Roy Scranton calling our attention to the opportunity in front of us. Men like Joe Biden stepping up and leading us as a labor of love. Jackson Reffitt drawing the attention of the F.B.I on his own father because it was the right thing to do. Anthony Fauci standing and serving the truth no matter how difficult.
Our world is a world on the verge, Beloved. I know I’m not the only one that can feel it. It’s a time of deep and permanent reckoning. Will we face the moment with passion, with courage, with compassionate and well-intended hearts?
We can only make our own choices and act upon them, and we can pray that others listen in the silence and hear the call of Divinity to us all. Our world depends on it.
Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her essays address the intersection between spirituality and culture. Find out more at www.susancorso.com