You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry

 I rented the 2007 film The Painted Veil last night on a whim. The cinematography is gorgeous, but the pacing is hit-or-miss.

 In one scene, Edward Norton (in his pre-Hulk days) walks into a cholera ward in rural 1927 China, and nearly vomits into his cloth face mask. The costume piece looks a little too familiar in 2022.

 

He spends the rest of the film trying to convince the rural, superstitious villagers to do the basic things that will stop the epidemic: Stop bathing in the same river you pull your drinking water from, and stop burying bodies in the riverbank. The town’s well water is also contaminated, so we have to seal off the well. You cannot keep dead bodies in your house, even for religious rites. You have to bury them, or burn them.

 

He’s trying to save them, and they hate him for it.

 

They also hate him because he’s a British expatriate in a country ravaged by colonialism, and he has little regard for their culture or religion, especially in the face of so much death.

 

I won’t say “spoiler alert” for a 15-year-old movie and a century-old novel,  but let’s just say that it doesn’t end well for him.

 

I haven’t written at-length about Pandemic Anger before, because I thought it would be selfish of me. I didn’t lose my job in the First or Second Waves, and a lot of my friends did. I didn’t lose anyone in my immediate family, but some of my friends watched their parents die. I don’t have young children under 5 who can’t be vaccinated. As for my friends who do, their brains have turned to mush from performing the mental calculus of whether to keep their kids safe at home and stunt their social growth, break the bank on private nannies/tutors, or risk it and send them off to daycare or pre-school in this hellscape.

 

As for myself (and all those folks mentioned above, I’m sure), this hair-pulling anger has been stewing in me for a while. Like the virus, it’s not going away - it just keeps regenerating.

 

Seattle was Ground Zero for the pandemic in the U.S.; we’ve been living with this threat for every bit of two years. When the Second Wave started to get really bad during the 2020 holiday season (when some of ya’ll just had to have big ol’ family Thanksgiving & Christmas parties), I cried myself to sleep at night, feeling powerless, thinking it would be years before we saw a vaccine. Thinking I might never be on stage again, until I was middle-aged. 

Thinking I might miss my window to have a (biological) family of my own, because how can you meet/date/get close to new people like this? 

So when I heard that a vaccine was coming in 2021, I wanted to shout it from my rooftop. I was ready for my draft number to come up. We had a common, clearly-evil enemy, just like the N*zis, and I knew I was A-1 (young, no health conditions), and so I needed to be at the front lines. My country (f*cked-up as it is) needed me, and I wanted to serve, to help protect the people I cared about. I would be proud to stand in line and get the shot and be a low-risk guinea pig. Anything I could do to help. It seemed the like least I could do.

 

And in my naïveté, I thought the vast majority of other people would feel the same way. Sure, there would be the QAnon-type anti-vaxxer wackjobs out there, but they would be in the extreme minority and hopefully, maybe, they’d all get sick and eliminate each other from the gene pool.

 

So here we are. The vaccines are doing what they were designed to do, which is to keep people off death’s doorstep and out of hospitals, to save room for the most vulnerable: young children and the immunocompromised. Many of us are going back to school and restaurants and theaters and theme parks and ball games. Many of us, especially in urban and coastal areas, are doing so masked, vaxxed, and boosted.

 

But many Americans, to the tune of tens of millions, refuse to get vaccinated. At all.

 

I keep learning about more and more people in my life who absolutely can get the vaccine, but refuse to, and I’m just… enraged. Fuming. I’m horrified and aghast at the selfishness, short-sightedness, and pettiness. 

 

I feel the same about these people as I do about those who voted for Trump a second time: You have no excuse anymore. You’re spitting in the faces of my friends. 

 

This time, it’s my friends who are nurses, doctors, teachers, food service and grocery workers. It’s my friends whose children are too young to get vaccinated. It’s my friends who don’t get the privilege of working from home; who have to risk working in public, high-exposure areas every day so they can make rent. It’s my friends who desperately wish their bodies could tolerate the vaccine, but they can’t. 

You people had your chance to do the right thing, and you f*cking blew it.

 

Imagine it’s 1942, and your community is in the middle of a rubber drive. But you’re riding around on a bicycle with brand new rubber tires, while everyone else is doing without. Now imagine having the audacity to be surprised or offended when someone pushes you off your bike and calls you a selfish prick, or a traitor.

 

Vaccines are strength training for your immune system. Yes, there are risks - it’s part of how they work. That’s why those of us who can get vaccinated, MUST; to make up for those who can’t. No, it’s not an exact science. But the risks are minimal compared to the alternative.  

 

To the unvaccinated-by-choice, the “I’m really cautious about what goes into by body” set, I say: How many other health risks have you taken in your life - long nights of drinking and partying, experimenting with drugs laced with who-knows-what for fillers, unprotected sex, junk food, inhaling exhaust fumes, opioid-based painkillers, cosmetic facial fillers made from toxins - but you suddenly decide that a vaccine with 20 years of research behind it is too gross or scary for you?

 

Where is your sense of duty? Where is your sense of social responsibility? Or, do you only feel responsibility for you & yours? And the rest of society outside of your little bubble can just go hang?

 

Do you think it’s not that big of a deal?  That almost 1 million Americans, and 5.5 million people dead worldwide- are made-up or exaggerated figures? That’s more Americans dead than casualties from all the wars we’ve ever been in - combined. On a worldwide scale, this will rival the Holocaust.

 

Do you think that history somehow won’t lump you in with the same people who disregarded the AIDS crisis, and who spread ignorant, homophobic and deadly misinformation about it?

 

It doesn’t matter that we have access to the internet and therefore, nearly all of human knowledge. As it turns out, people don’t actually get better, or smarter, than those villagers from The Painted Veil. We remain just as superstitious, ignorant, and shortsighted. If anything, we’re worse.

 

How small your world must be, if you’re paying more attention to conspiracies, non-journalistic blogs, and outlier anecdotal stories, than to published science. How sheltered, if you haven’t heard or read the desperate pleas from nurses and teachers who are on the verge of quitting their jobs - quitting their whole careers - if they haven’t already. From parents on the verge of a mental breakdown, whose toddlers have no way to get crucial early-childhood education except maybe through a tablet or TV screen; have never been to a park, or met their grandparents. 

How heartless you are, if you have heard them, but refuse to see the big picture and continue to cling to your choices out of spite, petulance, and stubbornness.

 

For all of this, and for the years of my own life I will lose to this — lost adventures, lost stories, lost kisses while I was still young - I despise you.

 

Norton might have been able to keep down the bile, but I’m not that good of an actor.