Nurse Raghda Samour administers a coronavirus vaccine to Ibtisam Abdall, 60, in Gaza City in August. By summer’s end, trust felt like the latest variant to avoid. No one seemed to trust others to do the right thing anymore, whatever that was. With the return to schools looming, the debate about masks and children - masks as protectors, or masks as educational folly - played out like a plague of rants.
Some politicians declared to the public, “I trust the science,” as if that were an unprecedented and heroic stance.Īs we navigated our way into 2021, questions about what to believe led - painfully and predictably - to doubts about the most reliable way we had to stay safe: wearing masks. The pandemic ripped through the rest of 2020, and America was not only more splintered than ever, but also a dangerous place to be. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?” With leadership like this, the country was receiving an injection - of chaos. In this way, distrust was a kind of pandemic itself: widely contagious and passed by the mouth.Īs the first American casualties of covid-19 were announced, President Trump kept insisting it would disappear “with the heat” or “at the end of the month” or “without a vaccine.” Like a disgraced, fringe science teacher, he entertained this idea at one coronavirus news conference: “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And before long, who and what we trusted - or didn’t - in the form of elected leaders, scientists and doctors became one more cause of death here and all over the world. When the pandemic came, first as murmurs that were easy to tune out, then as an unbounded crisis we couldn’t tune into enough, our relationship to trust was newly infected with something we didn’t fully understand. Scandals, abuse and corruption in the major pillars of our society - religious institutions, education, business, military, government, health care, law enforcement, even the sports world - have made us a wary people. Our level of trust, our very foundation, has been crumbling for a long time now. Love may be the emotion we like to think ultimately propels us, but it’s trust that informs how we go about our daily lives. Look at the back of the bills in your wallet. In 2021, the pandemic forced us all to think hard about who we do and don’t trust Introduction by David RowellĪs a nation, we are supposed to be built around trust.
0 kommentar(er)
