Facing the Beast, page 3
I forgive them for making a miserable scene about all of this in front of my then-ten-year-old stepson. The unmasked and unvaccinated are eternally accused of having made scenes, but the scenes were made, really, by the actions of those who were conforming and coercing.
I forgive them for forcing us to leave the festival. I forgive their demonstrating a pathetic and indefensible lesson in servility, and in submission to “orders” that made no sense, in front of an impressionable American child.
I forgive the teller at my local bank for throwing a paper napkin at me to cover my face, when I explained respectfully and gently, from twenty feet away from her, why I did not wear a mask.
I forgive the staff at the Walker Hotel, in lower Manhattan, for warning me that they would call the manager, who would then call law enforcement, if I sat at the Blue Bottle Coffee lunch counter with my unvaccinated self.
I forgive my loved ones for keeping us from the Thanksgiving table.
I forgive one of my best friends for leaving the country without saying goodbye to me; the reason was that she was “disappointed” in me for my stance on masks and vaccines. No matter that this was entirely my risk, my body, my decision, my life. Her “disappointment” led her to assume the burden of censuring me for something that had nothing to do with her. I forgive her, though my heart broke.
I forgive the friend whose daughter had a baby, and who would not let me indoors to see the child.
I forgive the friend who said he did not sit indoors with unvaccinated people.
I forgive the family members who pressed my loved one to get one more booster—thus leading directly to her sustaining heart damage.
I forgive them because my soul instructs me that I must.
But I cannot forget.
Are we supposed to just pick up again, as if emotional limbs were not crushed, as if hearts and guts were not pierced as if with sharp objects?
As if there has been no savagery, no massacre here?
All those people—now that athletes are dropping dead, now that those people’s own loved ones are sickening and hospitalized, now that the “transmission” is known to be a lie and the vaccines’ “efficacy” itself is known to be a lie—are they—sorry? Are they reflecting upon themselves, on their actions, on their consciences; on their immortal souls; on what they have done to others; on their part in this shameful melodrama in American and world history—a time that now can never be erased?
I don’t hear it. I don’t hear any apologies.
I don’t see signs on the Millerton movie theater saying, “Dear Customers. We are so sorry we treated many of you as if we were all living under Jim Crow laws. We did so for no reason at all.
There is no excuse, of course, for such discrimination, then or now. Please forgive us.”
Nothing. Have you seen or heard anything like this? I haven’t. Not one conversation. Not one sign. Not one article. “My friend, I was a beast. How can you forgive me? I behaved so badly.” Have you heard that? No, nothing.
Instead, people have reacted to the fact of their awfulness, of their profound wrongness, of their foolishness, of their ignorance and credulity, like sneaky, guilty dogs. They sidled up.
In the city, they quietly began adding one to the guest list. In the country, they began stopping their cars in the sunny air to have a little chat.
They began calling up just to say “Hi”—after two and a half years.
Two and a half years of brutal, ignorant ostracism.
I can and must forgive all those whom I enumerated. But it is harder to forgive—others.
That personal, inward forgiveness of deluded individuals, or of coerced small business owners, which is my own internal labor—work I do daily between myself and my God, just so that I won’t turn to stone—has nothing to do, of course, with the wrongdoers’ need on their side of the relationship, truly to self-examine and truly to repent. And it certainly does not avert the grave and terrible accounting of crimes, and the enactment of true justice, for the leaders and spokespeople and institutions who committed evil, that is now utterly necessary.
Without accountability, and truth and reconciliation commissions, and terrible, commensurate levels of justice served up to suit the crimes committed, as South Africa, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Germany have all learned to their cost, there is nothing at all to ensure that the exact same crimes won’t be committed again.
And yes, I write this with a clear memory of COVID mania apologist Emily Oster’s ignorant, self-deluding, and dangerous plea in the Atlantic for “amnesty,” “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” published on October 31, 2022:
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. The people who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive. . . . Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward. We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty.2
Or, no. It’s not about a “scorecard.” It is about a series of crimes.
Let there be no misunderstanding. “Amnesty” for crimes of this severity and scale is not an option. There was no group hug after the liberation of Auschwitz.
It is hard to forgive the high school in Chatham that forced a teenager to be mRNA-vaccinated against her wishes, to play basketball, and thus hope for a college scholarship. Those officials must be held accountable.
It is hard to forgive the doctors, the hospitals, the pediatricians, who knew and knew and knew. And bowed their heads, and plunged the needles into the arms of innocents, and committed evil. The doctors who today say, of the horrific side effects brought about by their own hands, their own collusion—“We are baffled. We have no idea.”
When did Western doctors, before 2020, ever have no idea?
The doctors and hospitals and medical organizations—who were discovered in 2023 to have taken money wholesale from the US Department of Health and Human Services—which they received only if they stuck to the HHS “script”—must be held accountable.3
It is hard to forgive the mayors of New York City, Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, who both drove the brave first responders who did not wish to submit to a dangerous experiment into joblessness, with no income with which to feed their families. They and other political leaders must be held accountable.
It is hard to forgive the Ivy League universities, that took the money from HHS and then delivered the bodies of their students, by forcing almost all the members of their communities to submit to a deadly or dangerous experimental injection—one that will damage the fertility of many young women and will damage the hearts of many young men; one that will kill community members.
They took the money and there is blood on their hands. Have you, parents of college-age children, received a letter of apology? “We are so sorry we forced your son/daughter to submit to an experimental injection that can harm him/her, that may cripple your daughter with bleeding every single month of her childbearing years, and that may lead your son to drop dead on the track field. And one that, it turns out, has nothing to do with transmission. We can’t apologize enough. (But the money—it was just such a lot.) Really sorry. Won’t do it again, rest assured.”
Did you get that letter, America’s parents?
The deans and trustees who took the money and “mandated” our kids—and some still do, to this day—must be held accountable.
It is almost impossible to forgive the churches, the synagogues, who took the money and stayed closed. Or who took the money, and then locked their doors at High Holy Day Services against the unvaccinated. (Hi there, Hevreh Synagogue of Southern Berkshire. Shalom. Shabbat Shalom. Good Yom Tov.)
“Please note that we require proof of vaccination upon entry for all High Holy Day Services. Please bring a copy with you. Masks are optional and encouraged for all who are comfortable wearing them.”
The rabbis and priests and ministers who took the money and practiced unlawful discrimination, and abandoned their spiritual calling, must be held accountable.
These are great sins.
But meanwhile, you have errands to run. You have books to return to the library and flowers to pick up from the florist; you must go to the kids’ soccer game, you must go to the movie theater, the hardware store. Back to church. Back to synagogue.
You must pick up your life again.
You must step around the bodies decomposing invisibly in the charming streets of our nation. You must pick up again as if you were not annihilated in spirit. Or you must pick up again if you were the abuser.
Will you apologize if you did wrong?
Will you forgive if you were wronged?
Can this nation, which fell so far short of its identity and its Founders’ intention, ever heal?
Can we heal ourselves?
Forgiveness on an internal level—of coerced or deluded individuals—may help us or heal us as private individuals.
But only the gravest of reckonings, the truth pursued to its limit in every single case, investigations and trials launched according to the beautiful rule of our law, and somber justice then served to leaders, spokespeople, and institutions—hey Dr. Oster—will ever allow us to heal, or even move safely forward together—as a nation.
CHAPTER TWO
Opening Boxes from 2019
In fall of 2019, when we moved out of what had been my home in the West Village, I thought I was simply moving from one place to another. I was excited to build a new home, this time in the South Bronx.
It turned out that Brian and I lived in the South Bronx for only four months, until March 11, 2020. That day, we looked at one another and realized we had to get into his SUV and keep driving north to Millerton.
Why? Because then-Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that Broadway was closing—just like that, a Chinese Communist Party–style State fiat, not an American-style individuals-dealing-with-an-emergency announcement. We both realized that bad things were coming, though whether natural or political we could not yet tell.
As a result of those two moves, twenty years of my possessions had remained, for the past two and a half years, in a storage unit.
So I was now opening boxes that were not just from another place—as is typical when you move; not just from another time; I was opening boxes that were from literally another world. I don’t know that such a thing had happened in quite this way in history before.
Some items memorialized normal life losses and normal change. Others, though, revealed that, between the time they were packed and now that they were being unpacked, long-revered institutions had lost all morality and authority.
Here was a grey sweater that had belonged to my father, who had been a writer. It still had the line of loose threads along the clavicle, the little gaps opening in the sewn-together pieces, characteristic of his distinguished-but-absent-minded-professor look. Dr. Leonard Wolf could wear a moth-eaten sweater on a street in New York City and still look like a Byronic poet preoccupied with his latest sonnet. He looked stylish even when he was bedridden—even when advancing Parkinson’s meant he could no longer communicate with words, his treasures; even when gestures failed him, and when my husband, an Irish raconteur, sat by his bedside, telling stories to make him laugh. He managed to have élan even when Brian had to ask him to make a sound to let him know if he wanted the stories to continue, and my dad could only groan: yes, more stories.
The stories have ended now for my father, at least the earthly ones. But the sweater still carries that wintry, breezy scent that was his while he was on this earth, telling us stories, more stories.
I folded my father’s sweater for the mending pile.
A small brown dog toy surfaced, chewed so thoroughly in one section that only the white lining remained. The little dog who had enjoyed the toy is no more. His dog tag is nailed to a tree that leans over the river in the woods, near where we now live.
I put the chewed-up toy on the discards pile.
There was the little white wooden armoire I had hand-painted—amateurishly but with love—for a child’s room. The armoire was not needed any more. That child—everyone—had grown up.
There were many boxes of what had once been exciting, culturally meaningful CDs and DVDs. I sighed—what to do with these now? The technology itself was obsolete.
Then there were the pillows. Floral pillows, tufted pillows. Even I knew these were tasteless, and I’d known that even at the time that I had bought them. When my loved ones were old enough to notice aesthetics, they would chorus, when I brought home a new find: “Mom! Please! No more florals!”
I had been obsessed then with accumulating not only florals, but warm colors—cranberry and scarlet, terra-cotta, apricot, peach.
With the eyes of the present, and now in a happy marriage, I realized what had pushed me in the past to acquire all these redundant soft florals. I had longed for domesticity and warmth but had been, as a single mother then, dating the wrong kind of man if I wished to get domesticity and warmth. So I had unconsciously kept choosing softness and coziness in decor because I was missing it in my relationship.
The man, a gifted, mercurial charmer, had also, in the past few years, passed away; young; of a wasting cancer.
I sighed again and put the floral pillows in the donations pile.
* * *
Other objects in the opened boxes, though, did not speak of organic loss and change, but rather of worlds of authority that had seemed sparkling and real in 2019, but that have revealed themselves since then to be seething with rot.
Here was the brown, pleated, Grecian-style dress, with the bared arms and gathered waist, that I had worn to a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard in the early 2000s.
Brown is a color I almost never wear, and I had never worn that Grecian style of formal dress briefly fashionable in the Friends era; so I remembered, as I shook it out into the sunlight of two decades later, that I had felt quite daring on that night.
The wedding had been in an event hall nestled in the dunes. Local seafood hors d’oeuvres had been passed on silver trays. The bride had been smoldering and lovely in a white lace Vera Wang (always Vera Wang) dress. All was as it should have been.
The wedding had brought together White House politicos, Washington Post op-ed writers and reporters, brash young New York City political speechwriters and campaign managers, and trendy nonfiction writers who were already making names for themselves. We were all in our mid- to late-30s—we were fomenting change, approving of ourselves, making a difference; we were like The West Wing, we thought (one of our friends consulted for it)—idealistic, unintentionally a bit chic, madly hopeful.
We were the scene.
I almost recoiled now with sorrow and anger. I folded up that dress, thinking about the institutions that had undergirded our optimism on that distant night, when our confidence had rung out onto the languid, salty breezes, along with the sound of the ultra-hip blues band.
The major newspapers? The once-young journalists? The two and a half years beginning in March 2020 had shown them to be shills for genocidal imperial powers. They became media versions of sex workers, scheduling time to deliver blow jobs to whomever would write them the biggest checks.
The once-young, West Wing–style politicos? The last two and a half years had shown them willing to become policy wonks for a global march to tyranny that instrumentalized a murderous medical experiment on their fellow humans, on their very constituents.
Where now were those institutions that at that wedding had filled us with pride and a sense of mission as we took our part in building them?
Imploded morally; left without a shred of authority or credibility.
I put the brown dress on the Goodwill pile.
I turned to an old scheduling notebook. It recorded some visits to Oxford. We’d been at a dinner party in North Oxford, hosted by the warden of Rhodes House. It was attended by the vice chancellor of the university and by many other luminaries. Indeed, the evolutionary biologist Dr. Richard Dawkins had been a guest; he’d been pestered, as he no doubt often was, by a dinner attendee who had wanted to talk to him about his atheism.
It had been a sparkling evening. I’d felt privileged to be at a table where some of the greatest minds of my time were gathered and where the leader of a great university was helping to convene us.
I loved Oxford with a pure love. The university had sustained a vibrant commitment to the principles of reason and to freedom of speech for over 900 years. It had supported the asking of questions when it was dangerous to ask questions; from just after what used to be called the Dark Ages; through the High Middle Ages; through the Reformation; through the Enlightenment. It had tended faithfully, through the darkest of times, the unquenchable flame of the wakeful mind of Europe.
The legacy of critical thinking of the West—was Oxford’s legacy.
But—in 2021—Oxford University too had complied with a requirement that its students endure “online learning”—a demand that had no basis in reason, or in the natural world.1
This damage done to its trusting young people was a travesty of the great innovation that the University of Oxford had given to the world—the tutorial system, in which being physically present with a couple of other students and with a don (professor) in his or her study, opens dimensions of rigorous scholarly discourse in a magical and irreplaceable way.
“Online learning”? At Oxford? An institution that had survived plagues and epidemics that dwarfed the respiratory disease of 2020 to 2022, that had survived wars and revolutions, and that had taught students nobly in the face of crises of all kinds?
