This piece was originally submitted on April 23rd, 2021
How are you feeling after 478 days of being fire-hosed with doomsday soundbites and click-bait headlines swirling around in a slow-and-low cooked propaganda stew?
Although the COVID pace of life initially gifted us with time to scrutinize available data and come to evidence-based conclusions, we have landed back on the couch with little patience for anything that does not support the punishment of the things that we have decided to hate. Imprisoned in our loungewear and stuck in zoom lectures, we feign vigilance as we scroll through the non-information… Armed with moral fortitude, we let the headlines roll over our retinas, searching for any confrontations to the version of groupthink that was decided yesterday to be “good.” All in the name of glorious lonely right-ness!
… It’s this divisive way of life that became more personal when this pandemic hit.
Since I was first mandated to be “safer at home,” I have bounced between virtual hangouts amongst my family, my friends, and my fellow medical students—groups of people who have been mutually exclusive in the context of my life and seem to hold mutually exclusive opinions. And yet I find myself in a similar position no matter my company. With inherent skepticism and propensity to be inquisitive, I manage to be labeled by each group as a member of the other. Whenever I question with genuine curiosity, I am deemed to be disagreeing—and thus, opposite.
Since each group of people has decided that they are “right” and “good,” I repeatedly end up in the pile of “wrong” and “bad” regardless of whom I gently interrogate.
Flipping between facetime calls and flopping between “science-hating racist” and “liberal snowflake,” I try to reason through what has landed me in the “bad” pile. Then I remember something from my short stint with political engagement about five years ago—at some point in America, we all agreed to hate flip-floppers. It’s these undecideds who fuel all that is evil.
And so, for the past year or so, I have remained in the quarantined category of evil. Until perhaps the day I finally make a decision at the last possible second, alone with my back against a wall. For now I find myself dancing a long winded, repetitive jive around a skeptical loop surrounding my own values until finally I promenade back to a place very near to where I began. Undecided, exhausted, with the bitter aftertaste of resentment and ambivalence.
Today is no different. I have performed my everyday ascetic safer-at-home routine:
- Check emails
- Update self on CDC data, NYS Department of Health Data, check google scholar alerts for “COVID-19”
- Pretend to do online elective work
- Get into Instagram argument about relative risk vs. hazard ratios with a cousin
- Interrogate assumptions that opposing rightness are built upon
- Check 401K from life lived prior to medical school
My ambivalence grows stronger, and my thoughts haphazardly clump together in a manic assortment of intentional thought. Yet, to date I have not formulated any true opinion.
I wonder about the death rate, and the cohorts most at risk. I think about the people who are unable to work from home with no safety net underneath them. I contemplate where collecting data would fall on my list of priorities if I, an epidemiologist by training and a medical student by occupation, were running things. I conjure up ways to empty the ICUs and wonder if they cared to count the dinner forks as the Titanic sank (now for the second time). I dream of a meal in a restaurant, with a server who smiles and pours my wine. I wonder why the grocery store attendant wore his mask underneath his nose. I regretfully open up today’s news briefing on Twitter.
I examine my conscience as uncertainty bubbles up when trying to pinpoint the evidence behind lock-down policies and think about alternative ways to fight this virus… Monoclonal antibodies, a big pharma race to find a cure with tax benefits and a cash prize for the winner and penalties for the losers. Dare I even think of the vulnerable succumbing to the infection, watching the curve rise, overwhelming the oh so broken health system, burning it to the ground despite the best efforts of government, corporate bailouts, and debt.
Afraid I may have crossed over from ambivalent and therefore evil to plain old evil, I bury those thoughts for now.
I daydream that Tony Fauci will be my next attending. I concoct a new strategy to prevent my mom from going to the post office today. I scheme with my brother on getting groceries delivered to our dad. I taste my most recent homemade loaf, disappointed by the lack of tang, I search for recipes for sourdough starter (the epidemic no one cares to talk about anymore).
I return to the most dreaded question of all: how the hell can we ever get out of this socially distant masked dystopia?
As you read my personal essay, I’m sure you’re positive that your opinions have landed you on the “right side of history” (a phrase which even just typing elicits a conditioned response of urticaria and nausea). You may even believe that you’ll never waver from your iron-clad certainty of being good in this everlasting gobstopper of good-versus-evil until death do you part. Perhaps you’ve deemed the opposites too uninformed, ignorant, or different to investigate further. Maybe you’ve even decided to cast me into the realm of deplorables you’ve come to know as “other” and cancelled me forevermore. Or maybe, by now you’ve noticed, the side that you believe you are on scarcely matters.
As we sort those with different opinions into a bucket of opposite and therefore evil, we ourselves land in the bucket of good—thank god, an outcome we knew we deserved! However, by transitive property, we are all good, and they are all bad, but we are they and thus we must be all bad. (Read that again).
If, Person A = good (100% certain), Person B = bad
And, Person B = good (100% certain), Person C = bad
Then, Person A = Person B, Person B = Person C, Person A = Person C
https://brilliant.org/wiki/transitive-property/
Having lost our patience for independent thought long ago, we can’t permit those who remain uncertain into our prescribed “good” category, and so they fall far below those who have decided to be “bad” and deep down into the unforgiving purgatory of evil ambivalence.
For those of us who remain undecided… We meet up with Lil Nas X on the way to hell and realize that we will never find a way to climb back into the bucket of good, no matter which mathematical properties you bend in our favor. Stuck in this category of mediocracy, without ever having the chance to explain our skepticism, we have found ourselves doomed to the worst group of all in a world that has only one common demand: pick a side.
And here we are, on an unproductive circular path down the road-more-traveled.
However, there may be hope yet for divisions to be breached. I was recently reminded that all data is ambiguous. That is to say that any set of data, no matter how ostensibly fixed, obvious, and agreed upon, is nonetheless open to interpretation. Our own interpretations may land us on either side of an imaginary line, but we found out earlier that those sides are equal and therefore we are all good (and thus we are all bad).
Perhaps we can take comfort in the idea that it is inevitable to interpret data differently and to experience facts differently, so that the same realities are likely to hold different meanings to each of us. We might even see that people and their beliefs are not so easily categorized as unequivocally “good” or “bad.” Rather than cancel the other side of the metaphorical moral line, perhaps we could start to look across it with less disgust and more curiosity than we did yesterday. Maybe we could see that line is more of a mirror than a fence anyways. We might even recognize the value of the ambivalent and the insights uncovered due to uncertainty and skepticism throughout our known history. Or, maybe I’ve gone too far towards the darkside—I should keep the ambivalent in their evil quarantine—a place where we are all comfortable. Ah, yes! We can continue to rest assured that the decided-folk have a common enemy: the ambivalent—they have no true beliefs and thus remain lost in the evil ether of their inability to pick a side.
Olivia Cohen is an MS4 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
