Falling Short
As I mentioned Wednesday, from sundown Wednesday to sundown yesterday, I was fasting for the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur as it’s known in Hebrew. I’ve been doing it so long at this point that the physical fasting isn’t even that bad — just carb up the day before and drink more Gatorade than you think you need. It’s not so much the hunger, it’s the dehydration that can make it miserable.
But on top of the physical fasting, the idea is to forego pleasures generally — which for me means staying off social media (thought that’s probably more of an addiction than a pleasure) — and to contemplate your misdeeds over the last year. So even setting aside the physical fasting, the real suffering is in the boredom and self-examination about the previous year. And what a year it’s been!
To be fair, everything since March 2020 melts together into a timeless, formless stew of catastrophe. A fondue of disaster, if you will. So it’s a little difficult to compartmentalize what merely happened last year. All I know is that I don’t feel great about a lot of it.
An incredibly divisive pandemic response led into an incredibly divisive presidential election, which led into an incredibly divisive transfer of power, and when all of that was over we went back to the incredibly divisive pandemic response, which exists in our generally incredibly divided culture. And looking back over the last year, I realize that I have failed in many instances to behave charitably toward people with whom I disagree. But it’s just so easy.
It’s so easy to look at people who performatively flout mask mandates or vaccine requirements and turn our noses up at them. It’s so easy to look at people making fools of themselves at school board meetings or town halls and think “well I’m better than that.” It’s so easy to read stories about people who downplayed COVID and/or refused to get vaccinated who then got infected and suffered greatly and/or died and think “good.”
A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of a sub-Reddit called The Herman Cain Awards.
Quick note for any of you that were born before 1980, or who aren’t terminally online: Reddit is a massive social media site where anyone can create what can best be described as a message board group known as a “sub-Reddit.” It can be as niche as you want. If it exists, there’s a sub-Reddit dedicated to it.
Now, the Herman Cain Awards is a sub-Reddit dedicated to pointing out — and thereby ridiculing — people who posted to social media about their opposition to COVID mitigation efforts who then died of COVID. Every post is basically the same four-act play in miniature: 1. A post from the person proudly proclaiming that they weren’t going to wear a mask/get vaccinated/socially distance/whatever; 2. A post about how that found out that they had COVID; 3. A post about how COVID was worse than they ever imagined and things weren’t going well; and 4. A post, usually from a friend or relative, with a GoFundMe for the person’s funeral expenses.
And there are endless examples. You can scroll through for hours. And I kinda fell down that rabbit hole. I probably scrolled through for 20 or 30 minutes one day, before I caught myself feeling a sense of sadistic schadenfreude. I suddenly felt unspeakably ghoulish and I was ashamed. These are real people, y’know? With families, and in many cases children. Young children. And I was deriving some sort of grotesque pleasure out of their demise because…what? They got taken in by misinformation or crude cultural tribalism? What a schmuck I am, y’know?
I mentioned not too long ago that pandemics ping something deep in our lizard brain. We have an evolutionary association between cleanliness and survival; and when we think others’ uncleanliness is a threat to our survival, we regress back toward our ancestors who would kill someone because they didn’t smell right. But pandemics also activate the parts of our brain usually reserved for more acute crises like natural disasters. But since this pandemic has lingered for so long, the acute crisis has become chronic and we’ve basically been overdosing on cortisol for a year and a half. So you pile one lizard brain reaction on top of another, and we’re basically one click this side of a snake. I say “we,” but that’s just to make myself feel better. I mean “me.”
What really brought my own inhumanity into focus was a Facebook post from a friend of mine. I don’t know if they read this, but I’m not gonna detail their business in my newsletter without their permission. So I’ll just say that their brother-in-law got a nasty case of COVID that landed him in the ICU. As a result of the COVID, he developed blood clots that caused a massive stroke. He’s been in the hospital for going on three weeks, and he’s still sedated and on a ventilator. Even if he survives — which is not guaranteed at this point — he will certainly have a long recovery and quite possibly permanent brain damage. He’s slightly older than I am, but not much. And all indications were that he was otherwise healthy. He’s got four kids, and his wife is an absolute wreck. I don’t know the guy personally, but I surmise that he almost certainly was not vaccinated.
And sure, it’s really easy to have uncharitable thoughts. “You dumbass, if you’d just gotten a free, readily-available vaccine, you probably wouldn’t be in this situation!” While true, it’s not useful now. It does nothing to comfort his wife or children. It does not aid his recovery. And to think there are people — people like me — who might read about him on social media and smugly shake their head just makes me feel kinda dirty. Smug is easy. Compassion is hard. At least for schmucks like me. But it’s something I’m working on.
I’m reminded, though, that there’s a reason the Day of Atonement is an annual event. We’re all human, after all. And while I’m fasting next year, I’ll be reflecting on all of the ways I fell short between now and then.
It’s True, I Just Don’t Like It
Yesterday, New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait aired an old grievance:
If you don’t feel like reading the whole article, the gist is:
One of the sad constants of American political debate is that, anytime the tax rate on the rich is to be either raised or lowered, Republicans will repeat a certain statistic. To wit, “The Stat” is that the highest-earning one percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all income taxes.
He’s not wrong. It’s definitely a thing we say. Chait goes on to say:
The Stat is literally true.
Oh, word? Then what’s the problem? According to Chait:
The first problem with The Stat is that it makes no reference to the proportion of income the rich earn. The juxtaposition between one percent and 40 percent is meant to convey the idea that a small number of people are carrying a gigantic and disproportionate burden, but the figure lacks any context when it omits how much money they earn in the first place.
After a bunch of “well actually-ing” about how much tax is actually paid in this country, Chait settles on this stat:
The actual truth about the American tax system is that it is slightly progressive. The richest one percent earn about 21 percent of the income and pay 24 percent of the taxes.
So even by Chait’s best-case scenario for his argument, the wealthiest 1% still pays more in total tax than their share of total income — a ratio that is true for the top 20% of income earners. The remaining EIGHTY PERCENT of income earners pay less in total tax than their share of total income.
But the reason conservatives make so much hay out of the “top 1% pays 40% of income tax” is because people like AOC and Bernie Sanders and whoever else talk about “taxing the rich” as if we don’t already do that. The assumption being that if we just taxed the rich a little more, it would be a pain-free way to achieve every government program we ever wanted. But it’s just rank innumeracy.
Just for some back of the envelope math, the United States GDP this year was somewhere in the neighborhood of 21.5 trillion dollars. Using Chait’s percentages, the Top 1% makes about 21% of all income in the United States. So even assuming that the entire GDP could be converted to income (which I don’t believe is a thing), the Top 1% would bring home about 4.5 trillion dollars. The proposed federal budget this year was a shade over six trillion dollars.
So, for one thing, we do tax the rich, sort of a lot. But more importantly, even if we liquidated the income of the Top 1% and sent it directly to the IRS, we’d still be running annual budget deficits. Which is sort of insane when you think about it.
Trient-Weekly Trivia
Wednesday’s answer:
Category: Medicine
Clue: A person with this blood type is considered a universal donor.
Type O
Today’s clue:
Category: Actors
Clue: He was a long-time presence on television as amiable astronaut Anthony Nelson and ominous oilman J.R. Ewing.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My daughter’s current favorite game is playing “school” — by which she means daycare — and it mostly involves her putting all of her stuffed animals down for nap. She lays them all down, puts blankets over them, pretends to read them a book, and then rubs their backs. It is unbearably adorable.