Fools Are Tedious

Why You Should be Hopeful

I understand why people think this:

James F. West @JFWestNY

The pandemic isn’t ruining society, it ruined it. Previously sane people have become dangerously neurotic and risk-averse and are eager to enforce that mentality on others with violence. Unsure what comes next.

But I don’t think it’s true. I think there’s considerable truth to it, but there are competing realities that may prove to be more important.

Start with this. As a final thought about Alex Berenson’s Pandemia, so I don’t end up just typing up every page of the thing, he discusses the reaction on Twitter as he began to point out that apocalyptic projections of severe disease and Covid mortality were overstating the scope of the crisis. The Imperial College and IHME models were showing far more pain and death than the world was actually experiencing, Berenson said; though the crisis was real, we were getting some good news.

That observation drove a good number of people into a prolonged fit of enraged ranting. On Twitter, Berenson read that he was a ghoul and a sick fuck and a sick fucking ghoul and a piece of shit; a writer in Los Angeles invited him to stop by for a visit some time so he could knock some of his teeth out. The message that prompted this violent rage was don’t worry, things aren’t as bad as they seem. Fucking ghoul! Somebody should knock your teeth out!

I had a remarkably similar experience on a much more local scale. Sometime in the spring of 2020, I was reading posts on (the absolutely dreadful) hyperlocal site Nextdoor, and people in my own small town in suburban Los Angeles were talking like they were living through the Black Death. Post after post was about the local danger, which was not just extreme but rapidly intensifying. After a week or two of particularly elevated agony-ranting, I stepped in with a long post pointing out that every Covid death in our town had happened in our one nursing home, and the CDC was saying that Covid was dangerous for people who people who were very old, very fat, already very sick, or some combination of those things. It’s important to find ways to protect high-risk groups, I said, but for most of us the danger will be pretty limited.

And then I went a little farther, and suggested that people sheltering indoors and overdosing on 24/7 doom-and-gloom fear porn “news” consider opening a window, stepping outdoors, taking a walk, and getting some sun. The post is gone forever, along with my Nextdoor account — because Nextdoor closed it, cue eyeroll — but I think I said something like, “Hang in there. We’re going to be okay.”

The response was the same that Berenson got on Twitter. YOU’RE DISGUSTING and HOW DARE YOU, a flood of messages about what an idiot and a monster I was. Because I told people they probably weren’t going to die soon and in agony; because I said we were going to be okay. You sick evil man!

Nextdoor has a direct messaging option; like Berenson, I got private messages thanking me, in the face of a flood of public messages telling me what a terrible person I was. The theme of the private messages was, “More people agree with you than you realize.” And ultimately, Nextdoor purged users who were reported for offensive messages, turning the site into a dismal echo chamber that — like Twitter and Facebook — I was glad to leave. In a town of 26,000 people, maybe 1,000 were on Nextdoor. Most people were smart enough to stay off the damn thing, and people who weren’t prepared to live in a state of performative fear-projection either never showed up or got thrown off in a hurry.

So my best guess is that our institutions are broken, but our society and our communities are quietly healthy: buried under a pile of loudly insistent panic from the twenty percent who have gone insane from fear, and who use the broken institutions to steamroll the larger group of people who have the FUCKING NERVE, as disgusting monsters, to not be insane with fear, but full of people who are mostly okay.

There is a breaking point. It will come. As the man said, our patience is wearing thin for you people.