Sujaan Lal

It’s hard to gather your thoughts given all that is happening in the world, and it feels like I’ve been trying to for forever. Every time I feel I am reaching the precipice of a fully fleshed-out conclusion we get a new statistic, a new depressing headline, or a new tweetstorm. I cannot believe I wish for a return to the days when a President’s machinations in his 140 character sandbox were the worst of our troubles. I often feel that I am not in a position for my words to mean much, and admittedly my thoughts are a bit all over the place. Some recent reading, “podcast listening”, and my own thoughts have made me feel like saying something, and if I recall, that thing called free speech is still around – for now. I apologize in advance if you feel a bit thrown around.

Many of the discussions we need to have seem impossible to bring up. Our problems are now too many to count, but the one thing they share is that social media made everything more grim. No one gave consent for this social experiment, but it’s one that we have no choice but to accept¹. We don’t know what the end result will be but so far it doesn’t look good. Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook lend themselves as platforms for information to be weaponized, and all communication has become centered around virtue signaling more than anything else. A false sense of moral superiority, rage and bad faith are increasingly the impetus for posts and likes. At least for me, it’s become harder and harder to determine what is true or real. In other words, we are going crazy – plain and simple².

Someone was fired for saying “all lives matter”. No matter how wrong an opinion, on principle it shouldn’t be grounds for which to take someone’s livelihood from them. What is even more ridiculous was a player on the LA Galaxy was fired for something his wife said³. For something his wife said. The most powerful man on Earth told us to consider injecting bleach as a means of protecting ourselves. If we were driving toward a cliff as a society, we have decidedly already fallen off it. We can only hope that there is some soft padding below. This retraction, a retreat into our own skull-sized kingdoms, has disabled us through our own powers of prejudice, bias, and misunderstanding  which we use to attack each other⁴. 

There is so much we don’t know, but most people act as if they have the answers to all the important questions. They then use this “information” to recommend to their followers what they think is right. It is almost antithetical to think that such conviction can exist in a time of such uncertainty. In this climate, in which a slight misstep is so easy to commit, and in which these infractions can be met with a violent response, the courage to speak up is scarce. To conjure it is nothing short of terrifying. This is unhealthy for both individuals and for society⁵. In a peaceful and modern era, our only weapon can be conversation. If conclusions cannot be formed in this medium then there is no other option than violence and very little good comes from conflicts that are settled this way. Type in Portland and see what happens – if you didn’t know any better you’d think you searched “war on terror”.

Memes have pointed out that the US case curve stands alone in looking more like a half-pipe than the gradual taper the rest of the world has worked towards. If it is indeed a half-pipe then this skate park has decidedly been built by our leaders for the poor to get tossed around in. Even still, COVID doesn’t care about joblessness or social injustice. It doesn’t care how we feel about it. It thrives as we go at each other’s necks, both masked and mask-less, both literally and otherwise as we approach the cusp of anarchy. Whatever benefits of the protest that may come to pass, the damages both tangible and of our collective inaction are hard to ignore⁶. Innocent bystanders have lost their business and livelihoods, and we are now seeing actual injury and death. The social contract with the black community has been broken too many times to count and the fury that has resulted from it is certainly justified. But the black community needs to realize how this looks to outside observers, many who still wrongly believe that racism isn’t a problem. It completely removes the environment in which productive conversation can happen. It’s easy to say that we don’t care about their ignorance, but it’s hard to imagine a reality in which being flippant will yield results. 

This is not to mention the educations of millions that have been stalled; or the lost time in which a better led government could have directed it’s country, a country that “made more tanks than people”⁷ in response to Pearl Harbor, to produce enough ventilators and masks for its citizens. Most people won’t think about doing many of the things they wished they had until life returns to “normal”, but Big Brother’s ineptitude in this moment is not only disheartening, it’s devastating. 

Of course for most there was no “normal” in daily life. The disparities in health and wealth that are accepted as the status quo across the world are orders of magnitude more acute in the richest country on earth⁸. Markets should be allowed to work, but the gaps now are just indefensible and what we are seeing is a response to that inequality. That said, the response seems to have no order to it. Some pockets are clear in their demands and others not so much. The problem is that confirmation bias has given people certainty. The certainty that theirs is the correct way forward and anything else is just an obstacle that stands in its way. This isn’t just a conversation about injustice or the mortal sin of racism. It’s about what it means to say something is true. What is happening on the streets and online is a “breakdown in epistemology”.⁹ How do we know what is real? If we can’t agree on what is real, or likely to be real, we will never agree on how to coexist, and for better or for worse we are stuck with each other¹⁰.

Keeping that reality in mind, the only way forward is looking out for one another. It is easy to whack others over the head with our morality as social media gives us a veritable Niagara Falls of content about masks, race, and politics. As a budding medical professional, this pattern is nowhere more apparent than in my own field. We have to realize how easy it is to stroke our own egos given the immense amount of knowledge and power at our fingertips. Almost the entire medical profession has incessantly called for this precarious lockdown we’ve been under for the past few months and has castigated anyone protesting it. 

To be clear, I support some of the most stringent lockdown procedures in order to establish a true new normal, but doctors and public health officials signing letters and making statements saying it’s fine to stand shoulder to shoulder in the largest protests in history seems to fly directly in the face of that new normal. The degree to which this has undermined public confidence in health messaging is hard to exaggerate¹¹. What the data suggest regarding the lack of a link between the protests and the new hotspots for COVID-19 is irrelevant, given that many Americans either ignore it entirely or choose to believe a charlatan in the White House. We must learn to communicate in the language the people are speaking, not what we think is most logical. In my rebellious fervor, I too joined a White Coats for Black Lives movement, but looking back this has been a mortifying piece of hypocrisy whatever your politics¹². Especially since the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all.