Vaccinate or Mask Up

‘This is how it unfolds.’

May 19, 2021

Courtney Martin

“It’s easy, if you are vaccinated, and in good health and spirits, to feel like the whole world is enjoying a moment of reopening, reconnection, restoration. They aren’t. Even folks within our own country—those suffering from long covid, those who haven’t had access to vaccines, or don’t trust them for various reasons, are still far more precarious.

Despite the fact that many of my vaccinated friends and I are tentatively stepping into one another’s homes and reveling in the simple joy of sitting at one another’s kitchen tables, despite the fact that I took my first hike without a mask on in over a year, despite the fact that my kids’ school says it will be fully open and in person in the fall–the pandemic is not over. 

In the wider world, it is very much raging on. 

I was reminded of this as I was standing around a playground on Sunday and got a WhatsApp message from a friend, someone with relatives in India. She wrote, in part:

My elderly aunt is battling covid. She was taking care of a dying husband and a disabled son. Now my uncle is dead and the government came and took his body away. My other cousin went to the crematorium alone. No last rites, expect my uncle who lives on the block, broke the rules and snuck outside to just watch the body being taken away. There is no point to this story beyond my grief and my rage and the unshakable pain that this is how it unfolds.

My grief and my rage and the unshakable pain that this is how it unfolds.

We have to remember that our joy is profoundly relative and propped up by a thousand unearned privileges. Relationships are a universal foundation—a richness that survives in every corner of the globe no matter the structural constraints. My friend’s uncle snuck outside, despite the danger. This is what we humans do.

But our ability to revel in and honor our friends and family are often influenced by economics and nationality and gender and race and so much else. In other words, we are profoundly connected by our need for relationships and profoundly severed by our differential capacity to nurture those relationships in this moment. To be healthy. To be healed. To be safe.

We are in a moment of transitions—all the way from the most intimate to the most global. Let us treasure our joy, our small, safe re-openings and reconnections, all the while holding the truth that so many are still in acute danger and pain.”

https://courtney.substack.com/p/de-centering-wellness

If you’re absolutely positively NOT gong to vaccinate, then mask up.