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Nathan Klein's avatar

I appreciate how you framed the pandemic as a battle over stories. I think warring over the narratives will tear our nations apart. I don't want to be pro or anti vaccine. Reading your essays has helped me determine to take a pacifistic approach. I want to hear both sides and reserve judgement until a later time when calmed tempers allow for more rational reflection.

The stance that allows me to remain sane is this: I don't know and I don't claim to know and I'm not going to fight.

Thanks again for bringing an alternative perspective to the chaos!

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Maren Morgan's avatar

I wonder if we may all find common ground in the unforgivable actions that seem to be generally forgotten in this debate. How can anyone say to anyone that it was "necessary" because of "safety" for so many people to die alone? In the pain of those who lost their loved ones is a pain that runs much deeper: that the dignity of their death was entirely stolen from them. Of course I'm not the first to say this, that beyond the individuals willingness to take the vaccine, there is a deeper chord being struck, one which pulls on our very being as Homo sapiens: our communal nature being utterly ravaged by the insistence that we can still be humans through screens and Zoom and the Metaverse. I watched my beloved Grama die for the past 2 years, much of my family refusing to hug her or be near her because they were so terrified she would contract and die of COVID. But, of course she was going to die. She was dying as we all do, albeit slowly, deteriorating every day. Was it really worth it to not hug her? Was it really worth it to not gather for her final Christmas? For "safety"? No, she needed to be a human being for the last 2 years of her life, in its fullest expression, not confined to a house and in fear.

That's also a story we need to reclaim: the story of what is Homo sapiens? Because we are not machines. We cannot survive in the world this amorphous "they" wants to build for us. And I will not die young in the world they build, living a half-life, being half-human. Running parallel to the Thesis and Antithesis, is the story of who we are, what kind of animal are we really? The breakdown of the story being told to us, which fetishizes the world of the The Machine Stops, will come as we wake up to the simple, intricate nature of what humans really are, that which has been so confused by the Winslow Taylor's and Hobbes' and Descartes' of the world.

My Grama was not alone when she finally died, and I thank Spirit or God or the Universe or whatever we may call it for that, but also the fact that my family, in our shared humanity, stopped with the nonsense for those days as she crossed over. We didn't talk about the Delta variant because it really didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was her.

I hope, in the end, we all can reach a point of understanding that death with dignity and togetherness is a facet of the human animal's experience: a facet as important as birth with presence and love. For me, that is the angle I am observing this phenomena from. Are we really serving life in its fullest expression through the Thesis and Plague story? I don't think so. One can only believe this serves life if avoiding death is all that is meant by serving life. But when death is a sacred part of life, an experience that cannot be avoided yet holds so much power and opportunity for love and connection to one another and to God... their stories fall apart completely.

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