The Totem is the People

Making the new church

Today I have a new origin story. Today I am reborn, remade, a new being. I have been recast, freshly created, newly animated by the word of President Joseph R. Biden, a leader who dared to protect me, to fight to keep me safe. Today I am new.

Once, in a world loaded with inappropriate and cruel gender-bound terminology, I was said to be a boy, with a mother and a father. Today I am born from new parents, parents free of gender, parents who give life abundantly and joyfully: Today I am born of the mask and the vaccine, givers of the gifts of life; I am a bounty born of the ungendered body of science. My gender is mask; my gender is vaccine. I am science; it is my body and my being, in an act of eternal creation.

If I am a born of the mask and the vaccine, then I am the mask and the vaccine. They are my body; I am of them, from them, forever with them. I walk as mask; I stand as vaccine; they shape me, form me, are my substance and my salvation. See me: I am the mask, I am the vaccine, I am this creature, I am safe.

We must start afresh. We, the children of science, the people of the mask and the vaccine, are of a body, undivided, a people. Those who walk not with us are not of us. They who reject the mask and the vaccine are not of the body. They are not of us, from us, for us. They are not us. They stand outside science, outside safety, outside the body of the people.

We will gather now as these people, joined as those of the body. We will make our places, places for the people who are safe, the people of the mask and the vaccine, the people who believe in science, the people who are made anew in its image, protected, held sheltered within. If you choose to remain outside the body of this new people, we must regard you as those outside. This is your choice, but you must go from us. You are not of us, not of the mask, not of the vaccine. You are without, in both senses, and unsheltered, and cast out by your own act of choice. As President Biden said, we have lost patience with you. You are no longer; we send you away into the darkness, into the place without masks, without salvation. The mask is the shepherd. You must depart the flock.

Leaders will arise, teachers, makers of ritual, guardians of the magic of the mask and the vaccine, a clergy of our safety. They will show us the path, and we will follow, and we will walk in faith with them, sharing our journey.

We are the people of the mask. We are the people of the vaccine. Stand with us. Stand in the body, safe, reborn, nurtured. We will see President Biden for what he is, and Dr. Fauci for what he is, the founding figures, the patrons, the saints, the gods, the originators. But we will make the body and the people; we will found our church.

Let us begin again, in earnest, with a great and holy act of banishment. Let us purify the body of the people.