Welcome to 2021.
Hello Everyone,
I undertake little, and I accomplish less.
Closing in on the first full year of a worldwide pandemic, the above statement has been the average daily assessment of progress both in and on the Desiderata Pen Company.
It is acceptable.
It's been several months since last you heard from me, and I want you to know that to my knowledge, I don't have fruitcake, and nor does anyone in my household. However, I know quite a few people who have had it.
To be bluntly honest, I don't want to end up completely unable to climb a flight of stairs, or indefinitely lose my sense of taste or smell, or spontaneously lose teeth, or have random blood clots floating all over the place looking for trouble, or waste away alone in a hospital bed unable to accept visitors while I drown in my own disproportionate immune response.
And just as emphatically, I don't want to accidentally pass fruitcake to someone else only for those things to happen to them while I feel nothing, because I wouldn’t want that done to me. Maybe it's the American way to not care when a problem becomes someone else's, but I don't like it at all.
As of last month, I've been a piano teacher for 14 years. After the first couple of years, I took a continuing education course, and I was asked a deceptively simple but very important question: What do you do when you have a student whose parent is telling you they have trouble, when that parent is, themself, a musician? I thought it would suffice to say "Hey, I've got this, we'll figure it out." In essence, ask them to defer to your expertise. After all, they hired you for what you know, so it should stand to reason they trust your plan.
I had this misconception too.
But in practice, when people are stressed, and they have a need for information, they are going to fulfill it. They will likely first go to a trusted source, but if that source doesn’t give them what they need–or what they think they need–or if it is absent, they will seek to fulfill their needs elsewhere.
They'll find whatever information they can get. Will it be any good? Probably not. Remember, this person may be a musician, but most likely, they're not a music instructor, and they have as much chance of doing harm as good.
When people are stressed, the stress of existential threat needs to be allayed; before anything can be done, they need to be reassured. Doing that requires a trust relationship. Without that, nothing can be accomplished.
They need to hear something like: "I'm sorry we're going through this. I am going to work with your student to figure a way out of this, and you’re going to talk with me throughout the week to let me know how it's going, and we'll work on this at the lesson. Sometimes I may tell you to put your head down and stay the course, and sometimes we might need to change measures. I'm going to do everything in my power and skill to make sure that we get you and your student through this, you have my word and all my credibility on this." The more intelligent the parent, the more imperative the response. I’ve learned you have to somehow soften and unclamp the chokehold which uncertainty has around the heart of a person who doesn’t know what to do.
That didn't happen.
Early on in what is now the pandemic, the person who needed to say that to the American people was the person at the top; John Barron.
He needed to quickly reassure us, hand the microphone to the professionals, and then go to work, but he didn't; he gave it to attorney Alex Azar, former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and then had Azar split the job with Vice Emperor Untoasted White Bread. Then he undercut them both every step of the way with unilateral choices about what rules he would and would not follow.
In those actions, we saw the birth of a situation nearly impossible to be led through.
Getting back to my teaching metaphor, while most people aren't musicians, they do have the internet. They have Google and social media filling their heads with whatever they think sounds good. They also have all the social media with which to spread their half-baked ideas as far as the internet can carry them. This complicates improvement. Again, being intelligent doesn’t make you immune to this.
Alright, piano teacher pen-man smart-ass, what, concretely, do we do? How should we behave?
Follow the basic public health measures.
Please go to this page and click on “Do I need to wear a mask and avoid close contact with others if I have gotten two doses of the vaccine?”
Listed there are the basic public health measures to follow. But sadly–and this is the core of the problem–I know it’s not that simple.
I’ve been good at my job long enough to know that people like me can be terrible at communicating importantly to people who don’t know what to do; For starters, when I went to the Centers for Disease Control website, it took me a while to find the link I just included. A clear, obvious banner of “DON’T GET COVID! HERE’S WHAT YOU SHOULD DO!!!!!!” right at the top would have been very helpful, but I had to spend a couple minutes on the site browsing to find what I was looking for. That’s part problem in a nutshell: I knew what I was looking for. That’s how I found it. But if I were an easy-going person inclined to not take things too seriously, and I didn’t know what I was looking for, it’s:
Unlikely I would know to visit the CDC website at all.
If I did visit it, I’d probably give it 15 seconds, saturate with information and then leave the site.
So here we are. John Barron is out, Joe Biden is in, and the federal agencies are trying to start doing more of the right things. And in my heart, I feel like I can't trust them. I know I should, but the experience of the past year has taken the trust I formerly had and squandered it.
Sure, I’ll hear from the CDC, and they’ll tell me something that I know, intellectually, sounds like reasoned, rational advice, but when I reflect on it in the context of my own experience, I'm left filled with doubt and suspicion.
Where is a person when they hear the voices of experts and can't bring themself to summon the energy for deference, let alone trust?
Lost in the desert with no manna.
So, again, what do we do? (Do you know?) How many times have I said that so far?
In a public health emergency, with a government that purports to function, no one should have to keep asking that question again and again.
In a nationwide trust vacuum, society is free to break down all around us.
I suggest we try to find a way to a place where we can get strong enough to start being able to allow trust to be built again.
Invest in your own mental health.
Get out of the chat rooms and pick up the phone.
Allow yourself to say “I’m not okay.”
If you’re feeling weak, reach out for help.
If you’re feeling strong, reach out and offer it.
Reach out to your community of people that care about you. And if you don’t have one, try and remember that love takes time, and it starts by one stranger reaching out to another one.
So I make a daily plan to get a little done. Sometimes I make it, and sometimes I don't. And I've got to find a way to be at peace with that. Not just for the time being.
Now, a few words about “social media”. I joined Facebook back when it was “The Facebook” and it was only available to a handful of colleges. When it appeared one day, no one knew what to do with it, so we sent “pokes” to waste time when we had gotten tired of wasting time on AOL Instant Messenger, and once we were done with that, we’d use it to store the photographs we were taking with our new 2 megapixel digital cameras. End of list.
The greatest value of “social media” lies in its role in commerce; i.e., selling me access to you so I can tell you about all the cool stuff I want you to buy. Access to your eyeballs is the chattel, and business owners are willing to pay top dollar to get it. That’s the only reason it’s still here.
But social media didn’t build any relationships that didn’t exist before it. We didn’t need it then, because an internet connection couldn’t buy you community, and we only think we need it now because many of the old tools and venues that buttressed society by enabling the building and establishing of community are either obsolete, inaccessible, or completely alien to an entire generation of people.
“Social media” is not social.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a business owner; I believe capitalism as a method of organizing an economy has some defensible attributes, but “social media” is a capitalist parasite.
It prays on your fear, strategically takes advantage of your bias, and using artificial intelligence and machine learning, it seeks to fill you with enough rage and disgust and righteous indignation so you never stop scrolling–I remember when they invented the “infinite scroll”–while stopping just short of so much that you get up and walk away. Why? To keep those eyeballs OPEN and ALERT so that when I pay money to get access, you are incrementally less likely to miss what I want to sell you.
Back to the pandemic: Trust in experts is down. We don't know what to expect, and we feel unsure what is going to happen. Because we don’t know what’s going to happen, or when, we don’t have a sense that the future is going to be demonstrably different from the present. Again, this can be existentially stressful. You might even rightly ask, why go on?
If you are asking that question, I want you to do me a favor: Pull out your journal, and your favorite Desiderata Pen, sit down, and over the next few days, find a good reason to get up in the morning. Really make that pen earn it’s keep.
If you talk to anyone who's been incarcerated for an extended period, I think they'd tell you that it can be a daily struggle, and that you have to hang on to what you know, and take each day as it happens.
Overeager planning can get you anxious and angry. Rumination can get you depressed; The “good ol’ days” won't come again; If not in the foreseeable future, at least not in any significant semblance of it, so I don’t advise driving one’s self insane dwelling on a future which might not come.
And on that front, I want to briefly share with you my thought on “herd immunity”.
If you know what herd immunity is, you’ve probably found yourself returning to the idea a few times since you learned the term. If not, essentially, “herd immunity” is a condition wherein so many people are incapable of transmissible infection from disease (either through disease mutation, naturally acquired immunity, or through vaccination) that the disease can’t spread to the people who are capable of developing an infection.
If you want to read what the CDC says about herd immunity for fruitcake, click on that link, and search for the phrase “COVID-19 vaccines and herd immunity”.
I hope you read that, and I want you to focus on what the CDC says we don’t know; in particular, one thing we don’t know, and what it means:
Experts do not yet know what percentage of people would need to get vaccinated to achieve herd immunity to COVID-19.
When I read this, I hear "we don’t know that the necessary percentage of people to vaccinate before herd immunity is achieved is not 100%.”
That is, the idea of having a condition and finding it worthwhile to name it with something like “herd immunity” only makes sense if the percentage is not 100. If it were, it would be silly to do so. In that case, “herd immunity” would effectively equate to eradication.
I should also mention that whatever the mythical percentages are found to be, that percentage of the population will have to have simultaneous intransmissibility of the disease. Being the novel fruitcake, if we don’t know how long a person retains immunity after vaccination or infection, and if we don’t know a person’s ability to transmit even while immune, it’s hard to make a meaningful statement about whether or not herd immunity is possible, in this case.
Finally, if you’ve not done so already, please subscribe to my YouTube Channel. I just released a video on my newest, latest pen model, the Vulcan, with a back story you may enjoy.
Sincerely,
Pierre.
p.s. I’m not a professional journalist. I’m not a public health expert. I’m just a craftsperson with a BA in chemistry and in music who wrote you an email.
UPDATE, May 3, 2021: Consensus that herd immunity in the US may not be attainable.