A Time for Leadership

What exactly, are we doing?

Someone needs to step up to the mic and remind us all what the game plan is.

At first, it was “flatten the curve.” Fine, that makes sense. If you’ll recall, in the beginning — with no vaccines in existence outside of clinical trials, with almost no effective treatments, with the realization already dawning that containment measures are futile (look how quickly each new variant goes global) — it was all about keeping the healthcare system functional, not overwhelming it with cases all at once. It was never some fantasy of eternal avoidance.

I remember reading at the time, the head of WHO speculating that within a year, everyone was going to have caught it. (Although I can’t for the life of me find confirmation of this now. Perhaps it got mixed up in my head with all the other misinformation flying about. Or perhaps it’s brain fog.)

But after a few months of that, the vacuum began to take hold. It was like, “Okay, what now? Are we still ‘flattening the curve’ or are we just going through the motions because no one knows what else to do?”

And then, with news of the remarkable successes from the early vaccine trials, suddenly there was light at the end of the tunnel. “We all just need to hunker down until we can get our jabs, and then all will be well.”

Soon the line jumping began. The rich, the connected, the unscrupulous crowding in front of grandma for their vax. Everyone was excited for a maskless, “hot vax summer.”

And then oddly, within a month or so, the very opposite problem set in. Suddenly you couldn’t beg, bribe, or cajole a large segment of the population into getting their life-saving injection. It was bizarre.

And so began the vax wars. The deepening political entrenchment. The stubbornness. The ridicule. Re-imposed restrictions, and a growing hatred on all sides.

And now, with Omicron? Have we come full circle from acceptance to denial to acceptance, that everyone is going to catch this hyper-contagious new variant?

I tested positive a month to the day after getting my booster — right when I should have been at the peak of immunity. I know of so many breakthrough cases in recent weeks, and the official statistics bear it out.

So what is the point now? What are we as a society doing? Where is the leadership? What is the plan?

The Left seems paralyzed by fear and inaction. The Right lives in a bubble of ignorance and complacency.

Someone with credentials, with respect, with equal parts common sense and charisma needs to step into the void. Or else, as we’ve seen, Nature remedies her abhorrence by filling the space with gobshite from every direction.

But who? Joe Rogan?

Half the country no longer listens to scientists. Two halves won’t listen to politicians from across the aisle, and a large percentage of both halves won’t listen to any inept, self-serving politicians from any side, period. So who will this sensible hero of sage and pragmatic wisdom be?

Or is there no such person? Is one better off pinning their hopes on Jesus returning from his endless R&R? Or on Superman? Alien intervention?

It seems like the least bleak hope one can rationally cling to is that Omicron tears through all levels of society and does its business. And then, having done so, that it recedes to being the new “super cold” that’s with us forever but we learn to deal with—just one more thing that can take you down in an ever-more-dangerous world.

And will we then at last have settled into the long-sought “new normal?” Or will the fear and the restrictions and the trauma linger long after?

Personally (and judge me as you will), I almost don’t care anymore one way or the other. It seems like the virus is pretty much gonna do what it’s gonna do, leaving us to fend for ourselves, to bear its ravages or retreat as best we can.

No wonder I keep reading about how Stoicism is suddenly back in vogue (a fact I find oddly comforting). For it was born, and came of age, precisely during times like these— times of chaos, disruption, and horror, and of having to endure.

Thus, I’ll leave you with this gem from Seneca:

Cease to hope and you will cease to fear… Both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.

…Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come. A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines his unhappiness to the present.

As I type this, I’m supposedly on the mend, but I still feel like garbage. I still just want to curl up and sleep it all away. But at least my organs aren’t failing, my lungs aren’t filled with hydrogel, and my sense of smell seems to be slowly returning.

So in deference to the Stoics, I’m calling that a win. May we all win in 2022.

Colby Hess is a freelance writer and photographer from Seattle, and author of the freethinker children’s book The Stranger of Wigglesworth.

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