Resilience or lack thereof

Last weekend I worried about a tropical storm that became a hurricane at the last minute and then became a devastating flooding event. After that, I was kind of listless the rest of the week so my creativity and productivity is at a low point.

Tonight, I’m just going to do a quick post about something that frequently pops up in my newsfeed: the anger and violence that is going around. I may have mentioned this before but it bears repeating: it seems like crime is rising and that people are becoming violent at schoolboards and elsewhere. At the present time, outside of the crime rising, it seems like the violence is coming from the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers. Personally, I don’t think the anti-vaxxers are just conservatives; I suspect that there is a good number of liberals who are anti-vaxxers because we had the anti-vaxxers before the pandemic came around.

I wonder if the anti-maskers (ignore the anti-vaxxers for the minute) are actually composed of two types of people: the extremely selfish who can’t do things for the good of the community and the extremely scared who don’t want to acknowledge the trauma we are all going through and thus just want things to go back to normal. I can’t see how this insistence that the pandemic is not real cannot be the result of wanting to ignore this existential danger. It’s terrifying to think that if you catch the virus, you could end up dead. Instead, let’s pretend it’s not happening, and to do that, we have to continue as we’ve always done before the pandemic: social gather without masks and don’t get vaccinated because the virus doesn’t exist.

I don’t know if that is happening but I can see it happening. And if that is the case, then it means that they will be unable to deal with the automation and the climate change that is coming on the heels of the pandemic. Those things are not going away and I think they are going to be unable to deal with those changes. I’m not sure what we can do to get them over to the other side. They could be the ones “left behind”, so to speak. I don’t see resilience in those people to survive the next onslaught of changes.

The anti-vaxxers are slightly different: some may not be actually anti-vaxxers but either have no access to the vaccination or just are cautious about the vaccine and so could be convinced to get the vaccination. They are not being obstinate; they are thinking through the facts that they are receiving. So we have to give them grace and room to come to the conclusions and hopefully it will be to get vaccinated.

So that is my thinking on this whole situation: the violence may be stemming from the desire to ignore the reality and just go back to normal because to have to mask or get vaccinated means our lives are really changing. And it gets really stressful trying to ignore the news about the coronavirus, the cases, the rising hospitalizations, and the rising death toll.

Hopefully, those who have been vaccinated can retain their patience for the unvaccinated because I do see signs that those who have been complying with the masking and the vaccination are getting tired and getting angry. I just hope the anger from them doesn’t spill out.