Vaccine refusers test my love for the South
AUBURN, Ala. — When I had just moved here — six years ago and a lifetime ago — I was shopping at Publix, wheeling my cart out to the car. My baby sat in the buggy; I hit a bump and the bottle of sparkling water I’d just bought skittered onto the ground, exploding. A young man in a Publix uniform ran up; I anticipated frustration (I’d made quite a mess) but instead he apologized for my mistake and ran inside to get another bottle to replace it.
I tell that story to illustrate the extreme, sometimes unbelievable courteousness of the South. Here my neighbors think nothing of building a bridge over the creek in my backyard, so that all our children can play on it.
I love this place. Out of all the places in the world, I feel most comfortable in the South. I even like that as a Democrat, I cannot assume that everyone thinks the same way I do. I appreciate the diversity of thought and the spectrum of political views here.
But as I told a friend a few weeks ago, I didn’t know that moving here would mean I would be at a disadvantage in future pandemics. As I write this, just 34 percent of eligible adults here in Lee County, Ala., are vaccinated. When I went into Ace Hardware last week, my 6-year-old son and I were the only people in the entire store wearing masks.
The school board passed a mask mandate for public schools two weeks ago, in a meeting I livestreamed, then turned off because it was too painful to watch. I’ve been plunged into déjà vu, but not the mysterious or pleasant kind. The kind that makes you want to weep. Because even as parts of the country with higher vaccination rates start to return to something resembling normal, we’re basically back to where we were last year. Our hospital, East Alabama Medical Center, where my younger son was born three
years ago, is again being flooded with COVID patients. The delta variant is ripping through our community, and people are furious, but their anger is directed at, variously, the pediatricians who are encouraging vaccines for older children, the City Council who appointed the school board who passed the mask mandate and businesses that are not “ProFreedom.”
I don’t like much of what Kay Ivey, our Republican governor, stands for, but she earned my respect when she passed a mask mandate in our deep-red state. And more recently, too, when she bluntly told the unvaccinated that they were putting everyone else at risk. At this point, everyone here who wants a vaccine has had the chance to get one. Others have been begged, cajoled, threatened and reasoned with. But people who compare wearing a mask to being subjected to experimental medical treatment — as they do in a Facebook group for Lee County parents I’ve been invited to join — are not particularly susceptible to reason.
It’s easy to think, who cares what happens to them, the people who don’t believe in medicine, in science? But I care. I live with them, I go to the grocery store with them, I send my children to school with their children. There’s nothing like a pandemic to make you understand how connected we all are. And not always in a good way.
The South is a troubled place, of course, partly because of its devotion to the past. I was raised in northern Florida and now teach creative writing to students who are mainly from the state I now call home, Alabama. I read their stories and essays about what it’s like to be from here, to live here, to love the natural beauty of a place while they grapple with racism in their communities and monuments that honor evil.
Sometimes it seems as if the South is the butt of the nation’s jokes, but in my nonfiction class last spring we read an essay about Catherine Coleman Flowers, who is trying to improve her home state Alabama by repairing its appalling sewage problems. We spoke at length about the Amazon unionizers in Bessemer, Ala., a place all my students knew. We talked about what it must feel like to be a normal person going up against the most powerful corporation in the world. I was proud of those workers, proud to share a state with people who were that brave.
But the pandemic has complicated that pride. It has done so by upending one of my deeply held beliefs — that living among people who are different from you is a good thing. That it is good because it challenges you to think and act compassionately.
To love your neighbor. I still believe all that, but to be honest, right now I’d rather live in a place where everyone thought the same way I do, simply because
I’d like to live in a place where everyone was vaccinated.
Southerners are famous for their graciousness. All of that seems lost right now; one only has to witness a City Council meeting, as I did last week, and listen to people ranting furiously about their freedoms and all that they have lost, and stand to lose, by masking to understand that we live in a deeply troubled place. A place where a local pediatrician is mocked online for enrolling her children in vaccine trials, where science and medical advice are sources of deep, unending suspicion.
I find myself astonished these days, by my fellow humans’ meanness, their outrageous spitefulness, as if COVID has invaded not only our lungs but also our psyches, the parts of our brains that ask us to care about not only the people we don’t know, but also the people we do. The people we see every day, as we drop our children off at school and shop for groceries and do all the things that make a life.
I went to Publix recently and was standing in front of the vast granola bar section, trying to work out which brand had the lowest sugar, when an unmasked store worker asked me if he could help.
I glared at him and said no, though I’m not sure whether he could discern my glare, since half my face was covered. And even if he could, I’m not sure he would understand why I was glaring, since out of all the people I saw at Publix that day, very few of them were masked.