The mad ramblings of people America and globalization have failed, desperately searching for meaning in all the wrong places

I want to have empathy for the unhinged Americans who come to school board meetings with outrageous vaccine and mask conspiracy theories but it isn't easy.

I’ve been writing about vaccines and masks lately. Part of this is born out of frustration with the attitude I see on the left—sneering, mocking, holier-than thou crap that I find off-putting and that I believe won’t convince dubious Americans that the vaccine will help.

I’ve also been critical of ongoing doom-and-gloom media coverage of the virus, and wary of how this will all play out. No, masks on children isn’t the end of the world, but I do wonder if it helps as much as we hope it does, and I worry how long it will continue. All of this sucks, is my point, and sometimes I lose my patience with it. I’m only human.

I have mixed and honestly ever-changing feelings about how we should handle the pandemic because I just don’t know the answers. I am okay admitting this. My mind changes, my knowledge is limited and I appreciate all of you, dearest readers, for helping me learn and ask questions and grow.

My criticism is generally aimed at the left because I consider myself part of the left (though who knows these days what “left” or “right” even means) and I think it’s more valuable to critique your own “team” and its excesses than it is to take cheap shots at the other team. As my team has changed over the past decade into a more censorious, cancel-happy, judgy and authoritarian bunch, my critique has intensified. I love the left, the fuck you left that mistrusts all institutions and politicians—the state, the media, the corporations, the easy answers, the censors, the warmongers, the bigots. That left seems much-diminished, too eager to “prevent harm” and too quick to make everything about identity politics.

But sometimes you have to take cheap shots at the other team, or at least at its most unhinged members. Like the people in this video whose children, I suspect, will not be helped much by the public school system if this is what they’re returning home to after hours. Behold:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone with dreadlocks this angry before. Like dude, go for a jog and maybe try meditation or something. I hear the Wim Hoff method chills you out.

Sigh.

Look, I’m sick of the pandemic. I’m sick of the doom-and-gloom from the media. I’m sick of it. I’m angry at the ways it’s affected my life and my family’s life and I’m so tired of it all but let’s be realistic here. Yes, we need to be worried at ever-expanding state power. I doubt many of these people were protesting the Patriot Act, however. I’m deeply concerned by expanding state and corporate power, especially with the rise of Big Tech and social media.

But this shit is crazy. Y’all sound like absolute nut jobs, and that includes you Mr. Clean Cut Rep. Madison Cawthorn, scoring your political points like a true politician. Making children wear masks really sucks but the kids’ll be alright. It’s not “psychological child abuse” which is something far, far too many kids actually face and suffer from. Don’t conflate the two. It’s gross. Almost as gross as that one guy makes vaccines sound—that guy who obviously “did his own research”.

But I am not here to take cheap shots, it turns out. I am here to try to understand. How can we get past this madness if we don’t try to understand each other?

I suspect with some of these folks, it’s mental illness at play. With some, it’s misguided belief in conspiracy theories and other mumbo jumbo that probably gives their lives some kind of warped meaning, some kind of struggle to latch onto that’s not quite as depressing and horrible as their economic and social and family situations. We yearn for powerful, meaningful struggles in our lives because our lives are so often devoid of powerful, meaningful things. It’s not so different than looking for love.

Many of these people come from regions that have suffered decades of economic decline, communities that have been upended by outsourced jobs, closed factories and power plants, the rise of job-replacing technology and the scourge of the opioid epidemic. Poverty is cyclical and while that’s not really an excuse, it is an explanation. I want to have empathy for these people. I want to say we can do better as a society.

I’m not sure we can. But we can try.

I suppose this is what motivates a lot of what I write. It’s so easy to say “good grief these people are psycho let’s mock and deride them” because they are, well, pretty off the reservation and it is funny in a way that there are actually people out there who believe this stuff—true believers, too, not just doing this to score points.

But honestly it just makes me sad. Really deeply sad. We’ve clearly let hate and misinformation and fear rule us as a society and I don’t see that changing and it’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?

I have much less sympathy for someone like Cawthorn whose use of “on the alter of wokeness” not only completely misunderstands what wokeness is but who is also just a partisan opportunist hack using his power and privilege to take advantage of people the way politicians always do. My empathy extends only so far. Cawthorn can go suck a fuck.

Look, probably some of the people in this video will die from COVID-19. That’s a tragedy; the loss of human life always is. Many like them will die from tobacco or alcohol, from cancer and heart disease, from inexcusable poverty.

Probably someone like Cawthorn won’t (I’m not sure if he’s vaccinated but most political leaders have been) but it’s not like our political class has ever cared much about human life (as long as it isn’t their own). 650,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 and counting prove as much, not to mention all the wars, our horrifically unjust healthcare system and the countless nonviolent offenders rotting away in prison.

Brian Williams joked about this clip: “Perhaps you remember your first edible."

That’s funny, that’s some good snark from Mr. News Anchor. But perhaps you don’t remember the first time your mom got laid off from her job at the Intel chip factory and your dad lost his job at the mine and your uncle or your best friend OD’d on fentanyl that they thought was oxycontin and you can’t afford to keep this baby but you can’t bring yourself to go to the clinic, either. And it’s not like there are any jobs.

So when you see this kind of video with these angry people spouting off lunatic nonsense, just try to have some empathy. Life is hard. It breaks people. Harder for people in economically depressed areas, whether those are inner cities or rural regions that continue to lose not just jobs and people, but their identity and spirit.

Can we change these peoples’ minds? Maybe not.

But also, maybe.