Voicing our commitment to protect each other
There are moments during the pandemic that require us to each, individually, judge what we believe about the way the virus behaves, and then decide how to act accordingly. For example, if you have just recovered from omicron, you may wonder if you are immune, and if so, for how long. In preparing to make this judgment, you may ask your friends or your doctor for information, or you may read about it, or you may simply believe what is most convenient for you to believe without asking anyone at all. Then, if you believe you are immune, you may decide to relax your protective stance: you don’t wear masks as often, or you don’t wear them at all any more, or you only wear them when there is social pressure to do so. And you may believe that this relaxation is consistent with the desire to protect your community.
I don’t see how we could avoid the need for us each to form our individual beliefs about how the virus behaves. To me, that need seems fundamental to being human. However, it doesn’t follow that our individual decisions have to be so fragmented because of all the different things we wish were true. If our society had a common source of the best scientific information available that was freely available to all, and trusted by most, then large numbers of us would be able to come to similar conclusions about how the virus behaves. Then, if we all had a shared sense of responsibility to each other — to all of us from the most healthy to the most at-risk — we would all be able to come to similar conclusions about how to act responsibly toward each other: getting vaccinated, wearing masks, improving ventilation, and so on.
Suppose we stipulate that many if not most people really do behave this way: making an individual judgment about how the virus behaves comes first, then it is followed by decisions about how to behave, decisions which are roughly consistent with that judgment. And suppose that for many of those people, even if there is no common trusted source of scientific information, there is still a strong sense of responsibility to each other. Can we act based on that sense of responsibility to each other even if we do not share a common understanding of which behaviors comprise responsible action?
I imagine that many Quaker meetings are solidly in this place: “I am committed to protecting not just myself but my whole community, even if we don’t all agree on what that protection looks like.” This place has a very unfortunate characteristic: the commitment to protecting each other is a concept, and as such is invisible without constant, direct, explicit communication. However, the behaviors associated with protecting each other are obvious, because they are based on visible actions such as when and how a mask is worn, frequency of going out of the house, and so on. (Interestingly, vaccination status is an in-between, only partially visible.)
I don’t know what to do about the lack of a common trustworthy source of information: right now, all I can do is call it out as a real problem, two years into the pandemic. But I do know what to do about the natural invisibility of the commitment to protect each other: start talking about it, all the time, while acknowledging the reality of how hard it is to actually turn that commitment into action.
