The Possibility of Every Life
The desire to mock anti-vaxxers who have died from Covid is understandable, but it's still wrong.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
Greetings from sunny Cancun, where the Dead and Company shows I journeyed down here to attend were canceled, but thankfully the vacation is still occurring. In fact, the entire trip is comped, a worthwhile consolation gift!
Since there are no concerts to attend, I brought plenty of books with me, including the latest collection of Joan Didion essays, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean.” It contains the wonderful essay “Why I Write” and this all-knowing sentence: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” I could not have said this better than Didion did, and it is why, I suppose, I’m writing today rather than lounging by the ocean!
No Mocking
Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times with whom I often find myself in violent agreement. His column this week focuses on the death of Kelly Ernby, a deputy district attorney in Orange County and prominent anti-vaxxer. Ernby died on New Year’s Day from Covid-19, and it leads Hiltzik to ask, “How should we react to the deaths of the unvaccinated?”
Ernby was not your garden variety anti-vaxxer. She opposed vaccine mandates for Covid, but she also railed against vaccines before the pandemic. In 2019, during an unsuccessful run for the state assembly, she said, “I don’t think the government should be involved in mandating what vaccines people are taking” in explaining her opposition to a law that would make it more difficult for parents to get an exemption for immunizing their children.
She regularly criticized vaccine mandates during the pandemic and said, “the vaccine is not the cure to Covid, and mandates won’t work.” According to Hiltzik, “The policies Ernby advocated may well have contributed to the spread of COVID and to the damaging of the public health infrastructure in her own community.” And, as a result, he asserts that “mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled.”
I understand where Hiltzik is coming from, and part of me empathizes with the obvious frustration that led him to make this argument (I should also point out that Hiltzik rightly says it is “wrong to deny them (anti-vaxxers) our sympathy and solicitude”).
The mocking of those who have railed against Covid vaccines and then died from the virus is an increasingly popular pastime on social media. Reddit has a regular feature called the Herman Cain Award to ridicule those who, like the former presidential candidate, failed to take adequate precautions against Covid and died as a result. The anger that inspires these public displays of apparent incivility is not surprising. It’s, I suppose, one way to make sense of people who have needlessly died because they refused to protect themselves. I’d imagine it’s also a sentiment born out of frustration at hospital ICUs overrun by the unvaccinated and their role in preventing the vaccinated from returning their lives to normal. And, it’s a by-product of our political polarization and the increasing propensity for viewing our political rivals as somehow less than fully human.
But, having said all that, Hiltzik is wrong and so too is the desire to mock anti-vaxxers who have died from Covid.
The first and most obvious reason is that the transitory “joy” in making fun of the unvaccinated is hardly commensurate with the stab of pain for those who are grieving. The finger-pointers will quickly move on to the next target, but there is no respite for those who knew and loved Kelly Ernby. Why would they want to rub salt in the wounds of those who have lost something that they can’t get back?
Even more questionable is the notion that this Ernby’s death will become, as Hiltzik speculates, a “teachable moment.” Surely one can’t be so naive to believe that mocking the unvaccinated, who have died, will sway their head-in-the-sand brethren to getting the shot. If anything, it would likely encourage anti-vax truthers to double down.
It’s hard for me to see what ultimate purpose it serves to ridicule those who have died and put their families through more pain — other than eroding some small part of our humanity. And frankly, hasn’t there been enough of that already.
But the much larger reason not to mock Kelly Ernby is the tragic, unresolvable knowledge that she will never get the chance to fix the mistake she so clearly made.
To make a blindingly obvious point, but one that still bears repeating: there is no redemption from death. It is final and complete. There are no second chances.
What makes the human journey discrete from all other creatures on the planet is our unique and complex ability to change, evolve, and learn from our mistakes in profound and far-reaching ways. When we die there is no opportunity to learn from our errors. There is no ability for change. There is no evolution. There is no realizing the folly of our ways. There is only past and no future.
All that unique and precious human ingenuity is lost. Maybe in an alternate universe, Kelly Ernby would have survived her bout with COVID, realized how wrong she’d been, and encouraged other people to get vaccinated. Or maybe she would have survived and continued to spout anti-vax nonsense. Either way, not dying would have spared her husband, family, and friends the unfathomable pain of losing her far too soon — and from an easily preventable death. But her survival would have kept open the possibility that — somewhere along the line — she would have a moment of clarity and a realization that vaccines save lives. It’s that potential for growth that makes the human experience so astounding — and now that chance has been lost.
Ernby’s death is, of course, a needless tragedy. And Hiltzik is right to point out that her mandate criticisms may have cost lives. It’s difficult to reconcile her public spouting of dangerous misinformation with my sympathy for her death. Nonetheless, I grieve for her loss like I do every person who has died from this awful virus. It is the possibility of every life that makes it so precious and irreplaceable — and for Kelly Ernby that possibility is no more.
What’s Going On?
So on this vacation, I not only read the Didion collection of essays (which is terrific), but I also finished Åsne Seierstad’s book “One Of Us” about Anders Breivik and the 2011 mass shooting in Oslo that took the lives of dozens of young Norwegians. It’s a harrowing book, but also a deeply empathetic one. Seierstad tries, without overbearing judgment, to explain why Breivik committed this heinous crime and spends a loving amount of time chronicling the far too short lives of his victims.
In addition, I quickly read two World War II histories, “The Liberation of Paris” by Jean Edward Smith and “The First Wave” by Alex Kershaw, which looks at the American, British, French, and Canadian troops who first parachuted into Normandy and landed on its beaches on D-Day. The Smith book doesn’t break any new ground, but there is a particular joy in reading about a moment in history — particularly one as joyful as the liberation of Paris from the Nazis in 1944 — told with verve, enthusiasm, and vivid detail. Though I’ve read countless books about D-Day, Kershaw’s book was unique in the way it captured, in riveting detail, the unfathomable chaos of armed combat. I couldn’t put it down and read it from beginning to end in one day. I honestly can’t recommend it enough.
On the plane ride over, I watched “The Pig,” starring Nicolas Cage in a role that will make you say, “wait, that’s Nicolas Cage.” He’s fantastic in the starring role, and the movie is a beautiful story of love and loss and the intrinsic beauty in doing that which you love the most. Check it out. It’s worth a watch.
Musical Interlude
What could have been …
True that mockery may not be the right reaction to Emby's death; however, my sympathy, caring, and sadness lies with those in extremely critical non-covid-related condition unable to find an ICU bed anywhere at all and die because those beds are filled with unvaccinated covid cases (and by this time it's a willful choice to remain unvaccinated). Read this morning specifically about the death of a person with acute renal failure because simple basic dialysis couldn't be provided, and doctors saying that case isn't all of them by a long shot: "...the same thing is happening for patients with acute heart attacks or acute strokes." says one in Pittsburgh; "... dying in waiting rooms" says one in Tucson. (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/11/1071568846/u-s-covid-hospitalizations-hit-new-record-high-raising-risks-for-patients). My sympathy and sadness goes out to THEIR families, not to the families of those who spout conspiracy theories and spread incredibly harmful disinformation. My sympathy, caring, and sadness goes to the fully vaccinated and boosted desperately over-worked health care workers (some, now, even working with breakthrough covid) who are trying to be all things to all people -- and simply can not.
Too bad about Emby; too bad for her family (who probably supported her in her nonsense). But I'll save my sympathy and caring for the innocent victims of this pandemic, those who are trying desperately to help them, and to their families. Maybe Emby would have seen the light, but I sure wouldn't have put my money on it.