Feeling Triggered?

Feeling triggered lately?

Yeah, I thought so. Me too.

I don’t blame you. It would be hard not to be triggered with all the fear hanging in the air like a thick layer of pheromones.

What’s your poison—your particular trigger?

Are you afraid of death or permanent disability from COVID-19? How about the COVID-19 vaccines? Most people I know seem to be afraid of one or the other.

Personally, I’m afraid of both. I know several people who died from the disease and many others who have gotten seriously ill, some of whom are still ill many months later. But friends of mine have reported many, many adverse effects (including deaths) in their loved ones from the vaccines—and some are friends with strong genetic commonalities with my own family.

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Other big fears . . .

If you’ve been lucky and managed to avoid the Big Two, are you afraid the economy is going to crash and you’re never going to be able to recapture your former way of life?

Or maybe, now that you’ve been forced to stay home for extended periods,  you have decided your former way of life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and you’re afraid you’ll be pressured to go back to it?

Or maybe you know that societies, like ours, based on a predator–prey model , with huge disparities in wealth and income,  don’t tend to survive, and  you’re afraid billionaires have used the COVID situation to further consolidate their control over this country’s wealth, pushing us to the brink of revolution and collapse of the society we know.

Yeah, that one gets me too.

Maybe it’s simpler than that for you. Maybe you’re frustrated because you’ve been warning people for years—if not decades—about how broken our healthcare system is and how powerful pharmaceutical companies have become, yet you see people happy to boost pharma revenues and power, despite their overall piss-poor performance in the pandemic.

*heavy sigh*

Maybe you’re at peace with the fact that the world is changing rapidly and there is no going back to yesterday, but you’re not at peace with those who aren’t where you are, people who want nothing more than to turn back the clock.

I confess that I feel that way sometimes.

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Our fears are valid

Unfortunately, every single one of the fears “plaguing” people today is valid. While few people will suffer from all of those circumstances, each of them is likely to cause suffering to many.

What may not be valid, however, is our response to those fears.              

In case you haven’t noticed, most people behave badly when their deepest fears are triggered.

They frequently cling to certainty where there is none—like a newborn clinging to Mama’s finger—and build impenetrable bunkers from which they lob metaphorical grenades at anyone who ranks their fears differently.

Everywhere I look (for the past year and a half) I see people drawing battle lines, often leaving family members and good friends—good people—on the other side of the line, congratulating themselves on being right and moral at the very same time they are ridiculing and dismissing others’ valid concerns.

If you’re thinking ouch right about now, that may be a good thing. I assure you you’re not alone.

Right from the start of pandemic talk, I saw that people on opposite sides of every issue—lockdowns, masks, vaccines, off-label drug use—had valid concerns, valid fears, but almost no one was recognizing that fact.

I felt very much alone. To paraphrase Stephen Schwartz’s song “Corner of the Sky,” I didn’t fit in anywhere I went—especially social media.

In case you haven’t noticed, most people behave badly when their deepest fears are triggered.

They frequently cling to certainty where there is none–like a newborn clinging to Mama’s finger–and build impenetrable bunkers from which they lob metaphorical grenades at anyone who ranks their fears differently.

Equal opportunity offender

Not content to merely piss off those on “the other side” of an issue, I pissed off everyone!

When people pooh-poohed the pandemic, I mentioned that I knew several people who died of COVID-19 infections. Sure, some of them probably had “pre-existing conditions,” but how is that reassuring? Almost everyone I know—of every age—has “pre-existing conditions.” My sister, a long-term stage-2 cancer survivor, was sicker than she’s ever been. Two weeks into COVID, she woke up unable to walk. This is not “just a flu” we’re dealing with. Very recently, a good friend of mine would have died if she hadn’t been rushed to the hospital in the nick of time.

When people pooh-poohed vaccine concerns, I pointed out that the majority of so-called “anti-vaxxers” are people who believed in vaccines—right up until the time a round of vaccines hurt them or, worse, their children. They’re often people who have done their homework and know that the CDC, the mainstream media, and their sponsors, the pharmaceutical companies, have been systematically lying to us all about vaccine risks for more than a decade. And many of them can give you chapter and verse on hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies on the topic as well.

(Vaccines take years to develop “properly”—and I can produce documented data on “properly” developed vaccines that would horrify you.  Every vaccine that was rushed to market has had major safety concerns as highlighted in this NPR article on the Dengvaxia debacle in the Philippines, “Rush to Produce, Sell Vaccine Puts Kids in Philippines at Risk” [of death], and this History.com article on the 1976 swine flu vaccine that caused Guillain-Barre syndrome, a polio-like paralysis, When the U.S. Government Tried to Fast-Track a Flu Vaccine. It is extremely unlikely the current crop is an exception to that rule.)

Often what our brains choose to fear comes out of our past experience—with viral illnesses, with government overreach, with vaccines, and with other pharmaceutical products. Often we know intuitively where we personally are most at risk, but sometimes we don’t. It’s important to acknowledge that not being afraid of COVID doesn’t mean it can’t—or won’t —kill you. And not being afraid of COVID vaccines doesn’t mean they can’t—or won’t—kill you.

To anyone screaming about masks—to use or not to use—I pointed out that the science is equivocal. There is no evidence that the virus would just go away if we all just masked up as instructed, but wearing a mask does cut down on droplets that can carry viruses to others. In a crowd or around immunocompromised people, that’s likely to reduce the possibility of transmission and makes sense.

That’s me: Appealing to compassion and common sense in all quarters—an equal opportunity offender!

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What I’ve been up to

I’ve spent the last year and a half watching long-term, seemingly robust social and activism networks collapse under the weight of our collective fears.

For the record, my reaction wasn’t any better than anyone else’s. I found myself frustrated and short-tempered with everyone.

That isn’t who I want to be, so for the most part I kept pretty quiet and mourned.

I shelved a completed book that I know needs to be out in the world and put off publishing my website (for more than seven months!) as I rethought everything that has brought me to this point.

And I prayed—a lot.

One day, not so long ago, I found myself singing,

Cats fit on the windowsill. Children fit in the snow.

Why do I feel I don’t fit in anywhere I go?

Rivers belong where they can ramble.

Eagles belong where they can fly.

I’ve got to be where my spirit can run free

Got to find my corner of the sky.

~Stephen Schwartz, “Corner of the Sky” from Pippin

Stephen Schwarz had articulated exactly what my heart was craving nearly fifty years ago in the 1972 Broadway musical Pippin—a place where my spirit can run free, where I can engage in one of my favorite activities: intelligent, respectful conversations about things that matter.

In January of 2019 I moved upstate from New York City. I now live next to a river (okay, it’s really more of a creek) that rambles; while I have yet to see an eagle, hawks fly from early spring to late autumn. Since the first lockdown, I have been walking along “my” creek nearly every day, observing and photographing her daily changes. My neighbors know me as “the lady who walks.”

In other words, I’ve found my physical “corner of the sky.” Now it’s time to create my virtual one.

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Welcome to Zoey’s Corner of the Sky.

Here, I hope you will find respectful discourse on a wide variety of topics that we’re all finding challenging.

While I am dedicated to hearing different viewpoints so we can find the common ground we need to navigate our way forward, I can’t promise “no censorship.”

Make no mistake, if you are not respectful—to me or others in the conversation—I will delete your comments, even if I agree with your point of view. There is no place here for bullying or railroading.

I do promise not to shut anyone out of the conversation simply because they hold a different point of view. I also promise that people who are not affected by the topic under discussion—such as White people when the topic is systemic racism, for instance—will not be allowed to dominate the conversation.

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“We’ve become so polarized”

Every day I see people lament that “we’ve become so polarized” these days.

I agree—to some extent.

We have gotten “louder” about our disagreements of late, with lines of division being, very, very visible.

But opinions have always spanned a broad spectrum on topics that strongly affect people’s lives. It’s just that in the past, minority opinions were quashed to the extent that those holding the predominant viewpoints weren’t even aware that their viewpoints were anything but universal.

Take systemic racism, for instance. I know people who believe that racial division is a new thing—some of them even think President Obama was the origin of this division. But as any Black or Native person knows, that’s absurd. They’ve felt the divide since they were tiny—maybe even from the moment of birth. It’s woven into their DNA. But as Black people only comprise about 15% of the U.S. population, and the Native population is much lower still, most White people could safely ignore that divide until recently. The divide was thus invisible to many of them, despite the fact that its origins are obvious and deep, hundreds of years of enslavement of Black people, from 1619 to 1865, and horrific treatment of the Native population, including mass genocide.

In a smaller, but more personal to me, example, I recall attending a huge anti-Iraq war rally in NYC in 2003 that was hardly mentioned in mainstream media. Many of the millions of people who attended protests that day had been opposed to using the events of 9/11 to initiate war before George W. Bush announced his extremely popular “War on Terror.” Yet even the supposedly “liberal” New York Times minimized the 2003 protest, with its headline reading “Thousands March in Manhattan Against War,” though the body of the article makes it clear that more than 100,000 people marched that day. That’s a difference of two orders of magnitude from what was implied in the article’s title and still less than half the number cited by other sources, 200,000–300,000.

Because of social media, these kinds of divisions are no longer hidden in plain sight. Even the narrowest of echo chambers is frequently infiltrated by oppositional viewpoints—hence, the common complaint about “polarization.”

Personally, I think this is a good thing.

I’ve learned over the years that we can’t heal divisions between people by digging bunkers and lobbing bombs—metaphorical or otherwise. But neither can we do it by pretending those divisions don’t exist, or there aren’t very good reasons for their existence.

We do it by building bridges of commonality.

If there’s one thing we should have learned in the last eighteen months, it’s that life is too short—too short to hold onto grudges, to shut down, or shut out.

Isn’t it time we make an effort to build those bridges and heal the wounds of the past?

Let’s talk!

~ Love, Zoey