Gratitude

 

While responding to accusations that she’s a tyrant lying about the dangers of COVID, Renae Moch, public health director in North Dakota, asked a pertinent question: “Why would I want to do that?”

This, to me, is the strangest thing about the resistance to common sense that is now making a bad situation much worse. It’s stranger than the argument about freedom, which lacks the self-awareness to notice its own compliance, evident in the belief that a retweeted meme counts as independent thought. It’s stranger than the argument about not living in fear—with its deep anxiety about masks, vaccines, and governments. And it’s stranger than the argument about inefficacy, which somehow concludes that because recommended measures are not guaranteed to eliminate spread completely, they can’t greatly mitigate it.

In fiction, I obsess about characters’ motivations. Maybe that’s why Ms. Moch’s question jumped out at me. If public health officials, hospital spokespeople, and (most of all) nurses and doctors are trying to put one over on the rest of us, the obvious question is: why? What’s their motivation? What are they getting out of it?

I’ll tell you what they’re not getting out it. Sleep. Comfort. Safety. Respect. Empathy. Peace. Decency. Gratitude.

It being the season for the latter, I know where I’m directing mine this year.