Usually, we have to make an effort to understand. But sometimes a flicker of understanding comes unbidden.

To wit:

My sister-in-law and I have a happy tradition. Every Christmas when we’re with our family in Des Moines, we bust out of the holiday scrum and storm around for 18 holes on a frozen golf course north of town. We’re the only ones out there—not even sure we’re supposed to be there, sometimes parked by a No Trespassing Sign—and it’s pure freezing joy. Can you tell?

And afterwards, we always repair to this plain little country roadhouse for a beer and a shot of Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey!

Five or six years ago when this tradition started—just before Trump—Jeni and I knew we were in a country bar, and surely sensed that, yeah, the regulars there are probably not Obama voters. And maybe they would have somehow guessed we were city people? But who cared—it was a warm bar, and the bartender called us “hon” as she smiled and poured us another.

Couple years later, we sensed a little shift in the mood of the place. We felt more self-conscious as strangers in there—and thus, as, Possible Democrats. Or was it our own hyper-political paranoia?

Then, a couple years ago, we saw a shift, in the form of a life-size smiling, thumbs-up-giving Donald Trump cutout propped up in the corner. We thought about posing next to it for a selfie—tee-hee—but we didn’t, not wanting to make trouble, our judgment plenty sound even in the Fireball glow.

Well, Jeni drove past the bar a little while ago.

“It’s official,” Jeni said. “We can no longer frequent this place.”

Now we’re going to have to go to some upscale bar, where, though they have Fireball, it’s not already sitting on top of the bar when you sit down. It’s down below, and part of the price for it is the ever-so-slight disapproval the bartender expresses by taking one or two beats longer to “find” it. The same look you get when you order A-1, at Morton’s. Also at this upscale place, people won’t “have” drinks, they’ll “do” drinks, as in, “I’ll do a mojito.” And the bartender will squeal, “Perfect!” It will be terrible.

But the roadhouse is off-limits now, because based on the contents of our heads or our voting records, we aren’t welcome, any more than a Black person was welcome at the lunch counter of a Woolworth’s in the Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960—any more than a Black person is welcome in some bars in Chicago, today. Sure, the color of our skin would allow us to “pass” at the Trump 2024 National Headquarters Bar. But even aside from the idea of financially supporting these truculent bunker-dwellers, how much Fireball would it take to give you the glow in such a sinister situation?

I can’t speak for Jeni, but for a straight white guy like me, this sense of unwelcomeness is a very unfamiliar feeling indeed—but one I’ve felt more frequently and vividly over the last few years of motorcycling through rural backroads around my country. Feeling eyes on you, in bars and greasy spoons. Wanting to avoid conversation, to drink your beer and get out of there. The feeling of being in hostile territory.

Now, I’ve been the rare white guy in a Black Baptist church, at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH headquarters, in West Side political meetings, at many of my wife’s school functions. I haven’t always felt comfortable, I’ve sometimes been looked at strangely, but in the end I always felt, essentially, welcome.

And now I’m welcome in another way, as some of my Black and gay friends might say: Welcome to the club.

***

Postscript: And lest Writing Boots readers assume my reporting is infallible, I sent the above piece for Jeni to approve, and she texted back this picture, reminding me that we in fact did pose quickly with the Trump cutout, in our Fireball glow, on the way out of our favorite roadhouse for the last time.

I think we’ve all observed that the COVID saga has been harder on some people than others.

I also think different parts of the saga have been harder on some than others.

Among the people the current moment is hardest on is one of my best pals. Which is particularly disturbing, because this is one of the most congenitally cheerful people I know, and also one of the most rational. He is a lawyer, and a good one. He is one of the most thoughtful and articulate liberals I know. And judging from the angry texts I’m getting in the middle of the day, he’s losing his goddamn mind.

Can’t believe we’re going back to blanket K-12 mask mandates. Offended by the safety theater, like having to wear a mask when standing up in a bar, but not sitting down. Infuriated at the ever-changing official guidance, beginning with the initial lockdown: “15 days to slow the spread. Then it was to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. Then it was until there’s a vaccine. Then until everybody who wants the vaccine can get it. What now? We are never going to eliminate COVID. What’s the end point?”

He points out that “the odds of a vaccinated person being hospitalized with COVID are statistically zero,” and if I read him right, he believes everyone should get on with their lives, leaving it up to those who don’t get vaccinated, whatever their reasons, to protect themselves the best they can, and let COVID take the hindmost. (With the exception of measures to protect small children until they can be vaccinated.)

I think a lot of us feel that way. I know I do, a hell of a lot of the time. Members of my family who are in caring professions differ quite sternly when I start making Darwinian-sounding grunts. Of course, I respect that. Caring for other people is the reason they live. I also respect people who remind me—amid fulminations for which I do not apologize—that it’s always more complicated than I think, and I’m usually more self-involved than I know.

But it’s not protecting my own life that makes me feel so savage. I could easily clip my own wings for another year, another three years, another decade as our dysfunctional nation staggered stupidly along, beating back COVID this season and having it come back in waves and new variants next. I’ve already lived a lot of my good life, had a happy marriage and a wonderful child, enjoyed many friends, traveled in six continents and poured all that experience into a book that no one can ever take away from me. So if I never get in an airplane again, so what. Probably good for the environment anyway.

But that child of mine. We all say we’d lay down our lives to save our kids. But what will we do to give our kids a crack at a great life of their own? I won’t chain myself to a bulldozer to prevent my child from having to wear a mask (and try to learn from masked teachers) for her senior of high school, sad as that would make me. But I am afraid that another year or two of remote learning and major disruption could truly break her, and her generation. Stunt its learning, shatter its confidence in the future, scatter its focus and encourage it to trade in any remaining dreams for another TikTok video.

And to protect that, I’m inclined to be pretty callous toward the unvaccinated, and probably altogether too willing to accept the collateral damage that a “COVID-take-the-hindmost” policy would surely create. But collateral damage is a fact of war. And this really does feel like a war, to me. And not a war against Trump-loving anti-vaxxers, or incorrigibly suspicious Black Americans.

It’s a war against the particular dumbness of American culture, which has dulled all our minds, as one.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said the definition of intelligence is being able to “hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Opposing ideas, hell. Most Americans can’t hold any two ideas in mind at the same time.

And the two ideas we are least able to process, privately or publicly, are:

We want to protect life.

and

We want to live life.

In my lifetime, America’s three biggest blunders were made possible by Americans’ inability to hold these ideas in mind at the same time—and thus see safety and risk on a continuum:

Americans believed politicians who told them we went into Vietnam to keep America “safe” from the spread of Communism. As if “safety” was a yes-or-no proposition.

We invaded Iraq on the basis of keeping Americans “safe” from weapons of mass destruction that we were sort of pretty sure that Saddam Hussein had his hands on.

And now we are madly, drunkenly, stupidly over-steering from one policy to another on COVID—even now, with a president whose personal foibles don’t remind us of King Lear with a comb-over.

Why?

Not just because we’re politically crazed, each of us starring in a huge national political version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe.

But also because for a very long time, “home of the brave” has been the land of, “If it saves the life of just one child.”

Which has forced it to also become the nation of, “To hell with your child, I’m going to live my life.”

Personal freedom and civic responsibility are not ideas easily juggled by the American mind, either. Which is a shame, because our entire system relies on their sensible interplay.

COVID is asking us, as a culture and as individuals, to be smarter than this. Anthony Fauci is asking us to be smarter than this. But he and the best-intentioned leaders and commentators are necessarily affected by this particular dumbness of American culture. Children need rules, and those rules must be cut and dried, and sometimes they feel draconian because, Am I really going to get a cramp and drown if I get in the pool 15 minutes after eating a hamburger rather than 20? I said 20 minutes!

And that’s the idea that I think my lawyer friend has a hard time holding in his large mind. He makes his living helping his client assess the risk of taking or not taking a certain action. He sees risk all day, every day, on a continuum, low, moderate and high. He makes million-dollar recommendations based on such thinking. He knows some of it is guesswork. And he helps his clients understand that, too. Taking some chances is just a part of doing business. (Lawyers really are good at thinking about this stuff even as it applies to the pandemic; I was impressed by the subtle, thoughtful approach a Houston law firm took, to keeping most of its employees in the office throughout COVID.)

So when my lawyer friend hears, “the odds of a vaccinated person being hospitalized with COVID are statistically zero,” that is a no-brainer for him. But to many Americans, that sounds like, “Oh God, there’s still a chance.”

I ride a motorcycle. I’ve ridden in the Andes mountains and, even more dangerous, on Ashland Avenue. I think that forces me to assess risk—and to accept some. And to constantly reassess, deciding which safety equipment to wear for which trips, in which conditions. When to let my daughter ride on the back, when not to. Motorcyclists wave to one another when they pass—whether they’re riding Trumpy Harleys or urban liberal Triumphs. I think one of the mutual understandings that wave communicates is that we’ve both thought a lot about risk in life, and come to similar conclusions.

Most Americans don’t think explicitly about risk, and so don’t talk explicitly about risk, and so can’t be talked to explicitly about risk—only about absolute “safety,” or reckless “danger.”

So they either stay away from motorcycles altogether. Or they ride stark naked in the rain.

Which is their personal right. Except the mindset got a lot of Americans (and countless others) killed or permanently crazed in Vietnam and Iraq.

And it’s making it absolutely impossible to deal intelligently and humanely with this pandemic, despite incredible medical science and all the resources in the world.

And it’s driving my lawyer friend out of his mind.

Me, too, it sounds like.

This week I read in The New York Times that many inoculated Americans are “losing patience with vaccine holdouts.”

That’s like saying that many parents are “losing patience with their adolescent children.”

That comparison may sound a little condescending, especially coming from the author of a new book called An Effort to Understand: Hearing One Another (and Ourselves) in a Nation Cracked in Half.

But I’m also the loving parent of an adolescent child.

I’m loathe to call millions of vaccine-resistant Americans arrested-development adolescents. Indeed, one section of my book is called “We, Citizen: American Patriots Don’t Call Their Fellow Americans Nasty Names.”

So I’m not going to call the tens of millions of my fellow citizens who have chosen not to vaccinate themselves a bunch of arrested-development juvenile delinquents. And I’m sure some have reasons I cannot fathom, but should not insult.

And yet: Most of these vax-resisters, despite the adult maturity and emotional discipline that allow them to hold down jobs and raise families and support their communities, are exhibiting one or more of these decidedly adolescent qualities when it comes to a decision that could make or break the nation’s next year.

Or, as I call it, vax-olescent.

• An immortality complex. Like teenagers, many of these folks seem given to magically believing that even at their most self-destructive, they are indestructible.

• Callow arrogance. They’re smugly dismissive of any information from conventional sources; the more marginal the source, the more credible, to the vax-olescent.

• An authority complex. They are gleefully defiant because making other people mad gives them the sense of power and control they crave but rarely feel.

• Adolescent narcissism. Obtusely refusing even to countenance the notion of civic responsibility, they retreat to breathtaking self-involvement, so that they’re reachable only by members of their most immediate tribe.

• Sociopathic tendencies. To defend their untenable positions and execute their dangerous plans (and deny their own disappointment and self-hatred), they are capable of the most brazenly disingenuous, manipulative avoidance, excuse-making, trolling, passive aggression and gaslighting.

To paraphrase the sheriff in No Country for Old Men, if vaccine refusers aren’t adolescents, they’ll do until some get here. 

How, then, to deal with these people?

Well, how do you deal with any adolescent behavior? You point it out, you hash it out and then you wait it out while you sweat it out. You use your memory and your imagination to walk a mile in your child’s impractical shoes. You remind your child (and yourself) that really, you’re not yelling because you’re angry, you’re yelling because you are afraid—for the child and for the family. You find ways to say and to show (and to remember!) that you love the child, no matter what. And you try, and try again, to appreciate Olivia Rodrigo.

And of course the actual adolescent finds all of the above enragingly condescending, phony and hypocritical.

Just as their like-minded elders childishly resent “all politicians,” the academic “elite” and the “lamestream media.”

Well luckily, our vax-olescent fellow Americans are not actually teenagers; they are only behaving that way. So we don’t actually have to wait for their brain chemistry to change, for their fuckhead behavior to change. 

But unfortunately, we might have to wait until something terrible happens to them, or to one of those precious peers of theirs, to wake them up.

And that might require waiting until something terrible happens to the rest of us, too. 

In An Effort to Understand, I write about communication—not just with adolescents, but with all people: “It requires listening as much as it requires speaking. And deep listening. And constant listening. And careful listening. And imaginative listening. And repeated listening. And in our own time, if we are going to have a society that is worth living in, we must learn to listen, to hear, to sense with the tiny cilia of our ears and the tenderest membranes of our hearts—not just the words of our friends and family, coworkers and leaders, but their intent—their deepest intent, and emotional source.”

I’m sure I’ve done an incomplete job of that, in the six months since the vaccines have been available—and perhaps a result of this post, I’ll gain a more nuanced perspective than the one I’ve mustered here. (As often happens in tense conversations with my own actual adolescent.)

But if you’re going to have communication, the other person at some point has to listen, too. And the vax-olescents seem more inclined to stomp off to their room.

In any case, it’s not patience I’m running out of at this point.

It’s ideas.