On Seeking Vacation Absolution.
“Here’s my 10 point mental gymnastics social media thread where I ask everybody to rubber stamp my bragging about my risky vacation choices based on inscrutable personal risk calculations.”
I personally stick to camping and I don’t even do outdoor restaurant dining, just takeaway. But for many of us in the public health activism and advocacy space, we have entered the season in the U.S. where prominent people in our midsts ask us for vacation absolution for everything from springtime indoor restaurant dining to long distance travel to huge conferences that neglect disease spread mitigation.
Doctor pundits, pandemic influencers, public health content creators, covid focused medical professionals, and scientists with a big “covid cautious” following on social media start doing their “personal risk assessments” even though they had agreed that public health with infectious disease requires multiple layers for safety because public health is not an à la carte menu and that personal risk assessments were individualism that doesn't work well in a pandemic, etc. etc.. But since indoor restaurant dining is on their vaca menu, or whatever other plethora of big gatherings or close quarter activities are a can’t miss for them, they start posting social media with mental gymnastics, trying to hold their world together with the cheeks of their asses. Meanwhile high risk, disabled, immunocompromised, and other precautionary minded people are disappointed with the faves - which, if we’re honest - were always problematic.
Worse, if one criticizes or even expresses this disappointment, it likely will lead to more loyalist die-hard fans to dog-pile an attack, or even ostracize. This happens because sometimes people come into pro-precaution and public health advocacy spaces and hope that they themselves can get rubber stamps on their risks. So everyone’s not necessarily on the same page to begin with and it only becomes apparent when there are prominent examples. Most pro-precaution and public health people are eager to help people reduce risks, promote harm reduction, and not judge people for not being perfect. However, that’s not enough for the person looking for assurances. Some, whether they realize it or not, want to be told that their risks aren’t risky, want to be assuaged of guilt, or they want to be told it’s all gonna work out ok. Some people hope to find the magic key to protection without inconvenience.
I stick to just letting people tell me who they are, and then believing them. If they backtrack or reverse course at some point, great, but I’m moving forward, and history shows that we don’t need everyone on board to make progress anyway.
Related further reading:
It’s really disappointing when people of privilege who assert they want to speak out for the marginalized, then undercut their messaging with their own exceptionalism, when they fail to practice what they preach. “Do your own risk assessment” has been rightly criticized because it goes against the core concept of public health, so when public facing advocates hide behind the assertion that they’re just doing their own risk assessment, the inconsistency undermines trust.
I don’t think people are doing this on purpose, and I don’t think they understand how deeply hurtful it is, because of course people in privileged positions have trouble seeing things from the point of view of the marginalized. For example, some well-meaning professionals I know spoke enthusiastically about Davos as “a good example” of people taking virus spread precautions, whereas most of my pals thought that whole conference was so egregiously offensive from top to bottom, and resent having it held up as an example, rather than it just being deservedly ridiculed as an elite creep event. The hired help put on masks while the privileged people with their pre-event tests and air purifiers didn’t need to wear the masks? Not a good example, and not a good look.
There are just so many examples of For Thee But Not For Me that I have to continually point out everywhere in our society, in our media, and even in progressive sci-fi.
But then sometimes a group’s dynamic switches. People start confessing naughty diversion from a core value of the group. It may be about pushing the envelope on the rules, testing boundaries of others in the group, or because they want absolution from their peers on their own change in direction. Or maybe they want someone to pull them back away from the edge. Sometimes people are invited into the group and accepted despite not sharing the original values of the group. Sometimes it’s a bad actor luxuriating in mocking the group. But often it just seems like someone who was temporarily caught up in the thrill of a taboo.
And sometimes, for some reason, instead of urging caution, or calling for making amends for a transgression, or shepherding the waylaid to prevent such missteps in future -- instead, a number of people in the group, often with authority within the group, will rush to comfort the risk taker or even a bad actor, and grant them that absolution and acceptance without even any attempt or request for atonement. Sometimes deindividuation6 becomes a default scapegoat.
One thing that never seems to happen within group polarization7 is people rushing to comfort the marginalized in the group. The pleas of those harmed are sometimes blatantly ignored or even ridiculed.
Nobody could take any of these statements seriously: “We can’t wear seatbelts in cars forever.” - “We can’t wear steel toe boots at the factory forever.” - “We can’t use child car seats forever.” - “We can’t keep brushing our teeth every night forever.” - “We can’t stop people smoking indoors in public forever.” - “We can’t filter water at the sewage treatment plants forever.”
Viewing the Swiss Cheese Model of multiple layers of interventions as an à la carte menu is a gross misunderstanding of public health strategy. And any interpretation of multiple measures as a design your own combo meal misses the complexity of this strategy entirely.
Anyone thinking in these simplistic smorgasbord terms, claiming you can just do some kind of pick and choose one or two is just wish casting and should not be trusted for evidence based advice on personal protection or public safety.
When there is a virus circulating and there are little or no other mitigations in place, wearing a well fitting respirator mask is the primary protection an individual can implement. Anti-mask pressure is irrelevant to reality. Claiming you can just pick some other two measures and hope that it takes the place of masking would be like a motorist claiming they don’t need a seatbelt because their car is enhanced with airbags or they think that their fellow licensed drivers might be rational actors who will surely voluntarily stop at intersections through self realized individual agency even without stop signs or laws.
Good writing about important stuff.