Step 1: Identify where that anger comes from.
 | By Rachel Poser Sunday Review Editor, Opinion |
Anger is a deceptive emotion; it can seem simple and righteous and convinced of itself, but in reality it almost always masks something else: hurt, helplessness, anxiety. |
Lately, as Covid-19 cases surge again, many frustrated people have been asking how to channel the outrage they feel toward those who have refused vaccines. A recent headline in The Washington Post captured it well: "Vaccinated people are ready for normalcy — and angry at the unvaccinated getting in their way." |
There is good reason to be angry at people who have knowingly spread misinformation about the safety of the vaccines. We learned last week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is asking vaccinated people to wear masks again in certain areas of the country, as the more contagious Delta variant causes Covid-19 cases and deaths to rise nationwide. We are facing another fall and winter of restrictions, uncertainty and unnecessary death — an infuriating prospect for those of us who stayed home, masked up and got the shot — particularly those of us with unvaccinated children or loved ones with compromised immune systems. |
To wield our anger productively, though, we must first make sure we have our facts straight. On Saturday we published a guest essay by Sarah Smarsh, who makes the case that some of the anger at the unvaccinated has become yet another vector for older political resentments, as "blue-state liberals" blame "uneducated Trump voters" for our current predicament. |
Smarsh is a fifth-generation Kansan, a progressive woman who lives in a conservative state, and she often writes with ferocious clarity about the way that political stereotypes impede our ability to make positive change. So far, she says, much of the focus has been on the conservative anti-vaxxers who show up at town meetings holding signs about liberty. |
"They command attention," she writes, but "they are not yet the overwhelming majority of the vaccine reluctant." |
Studies from the Kaiser Family Foundation show that the most likely group to forgo vaccination is uninsured Americans, who fear engaging with our for-profit health care system even though the shots are free. |
Smarsh urges us to direct our rage not at "lost individuals but at systems of power that made our grim national death count the only plausible outcome." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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