UNITED IN ANGER

As COVID-19 drags on, division on masks, vaccines continues

Marci Arthur is 80 years old and recently had half her right leg amputated. But if you’re spoiling for a fight over the coronavirus vaccine, the College Park businesswoman will give you one.

Just ask the associate Episcopal priest who went to visit her last month.

She threw him out.

“I’ ve thrown more people out than you can believe,” said Arthur, owner of Truffles& T rifles gourmet cooking school. “So when that priest came to see me, it wasn’t just that he hadn’t been vaccinated, it was, ‘How dare you not be vaccinated!’ And then when he said, ‘Well, I’m immune because I’ve had COVID before,’ I said, ‘Are you a complete idiot?’ ”

She didn’ t stop there. The next day, she called his superior.

“I read him the riot act ,” she said .“I said ,‘ Isn’ t everyone there vaccinated? You all deal with the public everyday .’ Our presiding bishop, whom I ad ore, had mandated that all the clergy and their offices be vaccinated. So then I called their office and said ,‘ You didn’ t mandate it well enough.’ ”

Arthur wasn’t just thinking of her own vulnerability. A relative, just 17 years old, died of the virus. The grief is still fresh. In addition, her small business of nearly four decades closed for five months last year and, like many in the region, has suffered since. Even with a loan from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program, Arthur is still working to recoup the losses. And she still feels compelled to limit the number of clients who can attend class at any one time.

“Just go get a damn shot,” she said. “I’m not even nice about it now. This whole thing definitely has made me not respect people like I used to.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, we’re increasingly divided on issues of mask guidelines, vaccine mandate sand the boundary between individual liberty and collective responsibility. Yet we seem to share one common bond.

We’re angry.

The struggles of the past 20 months have brewed resentment, anxiety, hostility and intolerance for cooperation with our fellow humans. They have turned school board and city council meetings into shouting matches, sparked fistfights aboard airlines and spawned verbal attacks and even death threats against public health officials.

Remember the Wolverine Watchmen charged with plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer over her strict coronavirus lockdown measures? The militia group’s members armed themselves with more than 70 firearms and the materialsfor homemade bombs, planning to put the governor on trial for treason, federal authorities said.

How about the Georgia supermarket cashiers hot in the face after she argued with a shopper over wearing his face mask? The shopper left the store, then returned with a gun, killing the cashier and shooting a second cashier and security guard. Over Labor Day weekend, three mobile COVID-19 vaccination clinics in Jefferson County, Colo., were shutdown after passing motorists ran over clinic signs, screamed obscenities and threw garbage at health workers. It was at least the 15th incident of harassment at vaccine sites this year — in that county alone.

Blame biology

As it turns out, we humans are programmed to get pissed off. Cortland Dahl, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, said it’s how we’ve evolved.

“Our biology is hard wired to detect threats and to respond to threats,” Dahl said. “That’s essentially what has helped us survive as a species.”

Despite the rampant spread and mutation of COVID-19 — and the ever-shifting reaction to it — our biology still adapts at a glacial pace. Most of us respond in the same way animals do. A mom raging at a school board meeting? That’s a mama bear protecting her young. The crowd shaming a maskless shopper? A pack of dogs cornering an opossum.

Dahl has the curious title of “chief contemplative officer” for Healthy Minds Innovations — a nonprofit that has developed a free app to help people manage their emotions to avoid blowing up or melting down. It was work he started long before the pandemic but which has been made more urgent since.

Particularly because everything feels so uncertain.

“One of the most surefire ways to produce anxiety, depression, uncontrollable anger — all these unhealthy emotional patterns — is uncertainty,” he said. “Even a really difficult situation, if we know that there’s an endpoint, is easier for us to endure. It’s the unpredictability that really throws us into kind of an emotional tailspin.”

Consider Renette-Monique Dall’au, a 71-year-old Altamonte Springs resident who, after months of simmering, hit her boiling point in September.

“I no longer keep my mouth shut,” she said. “There are just idiots in the world.”

Dall’au knows better than most the devastating impact a virus can have — even one that, in most people, produces no symptoms or merely a sore throat, fever, tiredness, nausea or headache. Namely, polio.

Asa2 ½-year-old in Miami, before the development of a widely available polio vaccine, Dall’au contracted the virus, leaving her temporarily paralyzed on her right side. She spent an entire year hospitalized, her feet affixed to the end of the bed so she wouldn’t move. Doctors told her mother she would likely never walk again.

Fortunately, they were wrong. When COVID-19 emerged decades later, no one had to persuade Dall’au to be careful. She worked from home, venturing out only in masks and gloves and carrying alcohol-based wipes. When vaccinations began, she spent hours on the phone to secure an appointment. And after her second shot in mid-February, she continued to wear am ask and keep her distance. As summer approached, she dared tod ream of a post-COVID existence. Then, the delta variant emerged.

“I’m furious,” she wrote in a letter to the Orlando Sentinel. “I’ve just talked to a friend who chooses not to be vaccinated. She railed at the failure of our medical system because she got COVID-19 and there wasn’t a place convenient to her to get tested, thus de laying treatment andhusband got it first and is very ill. I’ m not sorry for them. They chose to get sick by not getting inoculated against this disease. I’m also furious because of the unknown number of people they infected before they knew they had it.” In case her (now-perhaps-former) friend missed it, Dall’au emailed her a copy of the letter.

“There’s not one word I would change,” she said. “Frankly, I think it would be a good idea for insurance companies to refuse to pay any medical bills for people who have the chance to be vaccinated and chose not to. If you hit people in the pocket, then they’ ll start acquiescing, whether they like it or not.”

Screaming into the void

To Gabrielle Seunagal, 23, those are fighting words.

“Is this really about health — or is it about control?” she said. “It’s like those videos you saw of people going up to shoppers in stores who are not wearing masks and screaming at them. If you’re really afraid of getting the virus from someone who doesn’t have a mask, why would you seek them out and get in their face?”

Seunagal, a Tampa freelance writer and fitness buff, spends considerable time on social media making her outrage abundant ly clear. She is especially livid over mandates — mostly outside Florida — that bar un vaccinated individuals from gyms, restaurants, entertainment venues, college campuses and, most recently, some hospitals’ organ transplant lists.

“They keep saying it is for the greater good,” she said. “But at what point is it acceptable to take away the rights of the individual to make their own healthcare decision? Just as I think it should be up to a woman to have a choice about abortion, it should be a choice to have a vaccine going into your body. To say otherwise is completely twisted.”

Of course, angry Americans didn’t just arrive with the pandemic. We’ve been getting angrier for years, growing ever-more-fiercely loyal to warring political tribes, contaminating opinions on public health.

On top of that came economic vulnerability, as businesses closed en masse and hundreds of thousands of people suddenly lost their livelihoods. Federal stimulus money relieved some of that pressure, but far from all.

“People feel that they’re being deprived, they’re being boxed in, they’re not being fairly handled by the system, etcetera,” said Dr. Hans Steiner, a professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University who studies anger and aggression. “Anger has a job to do. It’s a system that goes off when you threaten to take away things that I think are rightfully mine.”

Compound that with prolonged isolation and the pervasiveness of social media out rage—and the social media algorithms that amplify it — and you have a perfect storm, Steiner said.

He himself is not immune.

“I live in Palo Alto, about 10 blocks away from [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg,” he said. “I’m not a violent person, but I have these fantasies that I’m going to fling raw eggs or cow [manure] pies at his house. I know exactly which one he lives in.”

Especially in politics, expressing anger hasn’t just become socially acceptable. On the contrary, it’s admired.

“‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore,’ right? That’s become a badge of honor,” said Dr. Roy Perlis, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and associate chief for research in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. “The perception is that if you’re sad or anxious, you’re weak. But if you’re angry, you’re strong, you’re taking charge, you’re speaking up. People are much more comfortable with that.”

Unfortunately, our anger doesn’t serve us. Ranting doesn’t change minds.

Perlis, part of The COVID States Project studying public health behavior, communication and science, notes that nearly 60% of unvaccinated people surveyed about their decision said they worried about possible health risks.

“By and large, the things they tell us are not what gets reported on Twitterabout implanting micro chips ,” he said. “What they tell us is, ‘I’ve heard some people have heart problems ,’ or, ‘I’ m scared it’ ll make my emphysema worse,’ or, ‘We simply don’t know the long-term effects.’ ”

Another 15% lack trust in the institutions promoting the vaccine — and especially trust in the government — and 12% don’t think the virus poses a serious threat to them personally. Brushing off those concerns nearly always backfires, Perlis said.

“Simply telling people, ‘No, you’re wrong. You have to go do the right thing’ — I can tell you as a parent that doesn’t even work with my kids.”