Anxiety over the pandemic has turned into vitriol. But you can’t be mad at a virus. Protesters gathered at the Colorado State Capitol on April 19.
Before rows of cars started rolling through America’s cities, with people blocking entrances to hospitals, raising placards, hectoring public officials, and loudly venting about not being able to get their hair done, a single person seemed to capture the mood of the shelter-in-place resistance: Brady Sluder.
“If I get corona, I get corona,” Sluder said in a taped interview during his Florida spring break in March, just as the U.S. was beginning to feel the weight of Covid-19 and physical distancing measures were being implemented across the country. “At the end of the day, I’m not gonna let it stop me from partying.” Sluder said he and his friends had been planning their trip to Miami for months; no virus could stop them.
Sluder was branded a #COVIDIOT, an entitled narcissist, and worse. He along with others featured in the same viral news clip were widely derided for putting the health and safety of others at great risk for their own personal happiness — symbols of a generation who felt that they were owed the simplest pleasures and were prepared to risk death to indulge in them.
Less than a week after his star turn, Sluder issued an official apology via his Instagram account. By then, the seriousness of the situation had become even clearer. On March 22 — the same day New York City recorded 99 new Covid-19 related deaths and over 10,000 new cases — Sluder told the world he “wasn’t aware of the severity of my actions and comments.”
“I can’t apologize enough to the people I’ve offended and the lives I’ve insulted,” Sluder continued, vowing to be a better citizen. “Listen to your communities and do as health officials say. Life is precious. Don’t be arrogant and think you’re invincible like myself.”
I wonder what might have happened to Sluder — what conclusions he might have drawn about his actions and his role as a citizen — had his interview happened a month later amid the current landscape, where his refusal is more common, where his voice would not be so lonely and instead just one more member of an angry chorus. Now, things for him may have been different. Now, Sluder might not have been immediately branded a fool or foolhardy. In March, Sluder was a villain. In April, he could have been a hero.
Much has changed over the last month. Patience with the virus and the lifestyle it has forced us to adopt is running out. What began as a stunned but collective agreement to ensure mutual health and safety — and to publicly shame those who didn’t show solidarity in the mission — has shifted. The airing of grievances has begun and, in recent days, grown steadily louder. It takes a lot to ask an entire society to not only change its ways but to effectively halt them on a dime. It’s possible to achieve, but maintaining this new lifestyle is what has become a challenge. At first, we embraced our new shared purpose; now our spirits are drained.
All along, just below the surface of the #StayHome movement and the mutual assurances that we’re all in this together, there have been degrees of anger. Anger that people were hoarding toilet paper. Anger that we weren’t closing the borders. Anger that kids were going to spring break. And anger that others perhaps weren’t doing their part to keep everyone else safe. Anger, in other words, that things were changing quickly and that some people weren’t keeping up.
That’s all changed now. The winds of anger have shifted. While the predominant sentiment you’ll find in discussions about Covid-19 are still positive — plenty of people are still abiding by the rules and encouraging others to keep going, to keep the curve flat — the anger bubbling up from under the surface has morphed into something filled with more vitriol, searching for a target.
Maybe this new kind of anger was all inevitable, a predictable byproduct of everyone being bored and overwhelmed—or at least bored of being overwhelmed. Yet, just as the virus has made our personal and societal direction unclear, our anger seems to not know where it’s going or where it should now be pointed.
The current list is already long and seemingly lengthening by the day. Big government. Little government. Foreigners. Spring-breakers. Boomers. Neighbors. Joggers. Tech companies. Cellphone towers. China.
At a Michigan protest against social distancing last week, the frustration centered around the mundanities we had previously taken for granted. “You can’t buy paint. You can’t buy lawn fertilizer or grass seed or whatever,” one man complained in a viral Fox News segment. “It’s time for our state to be opened up! We’re tired of not being able to buy the things that we need, go to the hairdressers, get our hair done,” a woman, holding a sign reading “Land of the Free,” explains as the video cuts.
Buying fertilizer. Getting a haircut. Going to spring break. Infecting everyone around you with a disease for which there is no cure. Dying of it, too. These are, apparently, the freedoms we must defend.
But maybe these aren’t freedoms, really. Maybe they are just a handful of familiar things, the totems we grasp that tell us we’re still in reality, even if it feels like a nightmare. Buying things at the store, partying at the beach — these are the things we know, the things we can be sure about. It’s a list we cling to more and more the smaller it feels like it’s getting.
We can’t be angry at the virus itself because it doesn’t care, and it won’t listen, and it can’t change.
Because, all the while, the list of other things — the ones we don’t know — grows without ceasing. We can only guess. A lockdown until May? Or June? Or July? Physical distance until maybe 2022? We might solve this thing with a vaccine. Or maybe herd immunity? Or an existing drug? Or a different existing drug? Or maybe we just won’t? And we’ll probably have to test more people. We will have to trace them. Will we have to take a blood test? And how far are we already into this? How far do we still have to go? We just don’t really know.
We didn’t plan for this. There still is no plan. It’s difficult to plan for what we don’t know, especially when we don’t make any of the rules.
We’re angry that the virus has arrived, has taken up residence here in our lives, squeezed itself into our brains, and inserted itself into every conversation. It not only stands between each one of us but has evicted us from the spaces we once shared because it owns them now. And we’re angry that it’s killing us.
But we can’t be angry at the virus itself because it doesn’t care, and it won’t listen, and it can’t change. We are being forced to realize the scary truth that’s been suddenly thrust in our face: that we are not, ultimately, in charge of our fate, no matter how much personal liberty we may feel we have or how long our list of freedoms might be.
Or maybe now we’re just angry because we have the kind of clarity we didn’t a month ago. And now we know we have little choice but to accommodate it for the duration — just like any good host.