NOVEMBER 22, MONDAY

NHT (NOTHING HAPPENED TODAY), AGAIN

It was an NHT day. I stayed in my quite spacious little apartment with a Living room, kitchen/dining room, bedroom and bathroom all day except for walking to Aldi to shop for a few needed groceries and a stop at Berlin Dorner, a Turkish take out place where I got a gyro which I brought back for lunch. I didn’t take any pictures but I have enough unused photographs that I can show you what is going on outside. After weeks of activity this was the kind of day I had imagined months ago that I would be having almost every day. Sitting still and typing or reading with enough exercise to close the rings on my Apple Watch and a nap in midafternoon. This is what I would be doing at home in Swannanoa, an old man’s quiet day. In the afternoon Susie called on Facetime to report on her trip. She will call daily so I am not alone and then a little later my brother, Richard, called from Minneapolis. A good day.

But even on a nothing happened day enough happened to keep me busy. After rarely photographing for the long shutin pandemic year and a half, since coming to Paros I have taken thousands of photographs, several hundred a day, and only processed a few of them. I have begun to read books again. But it is photographing and writing that keep me alive, where everything this day was happening. Almost every photograph I take gives me a little jolt of intensity. Writing is a way of responding to the world around me by talking to myself, and then if I share it, feeling as if I am talking to other people, which makes me feel good, whether they are listening or not. Both photographing and writing make me feel alive.

But writing is also a way of dealing with things that puzzle me, a way of working things out for myself and getting my head straight. Feeling my way to awareness is one of the ways that I feel most alive. It is the process of writing that matters, not what I figure our.

Yesterday the issue that puzzled me and has been nagging me in the back of my mind is my inability to understand why some people, quite a lot of people, refused to be vaccinated while I and most of my friends have rushed to be vaccinated. From my perspective antivaxxers are nuts. But I have come to realize that conservative anti vaxxers, some of whom I like very much, have been fretting over the same issue. From my perspective why don’t people get vaccinated when it will save their lives and the lives of people around them and end the pandemic? But from the opposite antivaxxer perspective what gives government and the liberals the right to ostracize and demean people who choose for themselves not to get vaccinated, people who freely take the very small risk that they will die from Covid, particularly when there are scientists and politicians in the know whom antivaxxers trust with the facts on their side who make clear to anyone who will listen that the fears of Covid are wildly exaggerated and the risks of vaccination are grossly underreported. For these anti vaxxers there is a conspiracy between governments, elites and scientists, whom antivaxxers don’t trust to tell them the truth about anything, to actually allow their fellow humans to be harmed in the pursuit of making money and controlling populations. It is from the antivaxxer perspective a fascist plot against ordinary people.

I probably, out of bias, missstate the antivaxxer position, but this is the way I see it and is the broad problem that I want to find a way to deal with for myself. Because what I have discovered in the last six months is that there are people whom I like a great deal, really good people, intelligent people who have strong moral principles, antivaxxers, who are sick and tired of being ostracized and demeaned. I am personally absolutely sure that common sense demands that we must all be vaccinated as soon as possible to protect ourselves. But I am also sure that anti vaxxers can’t be persuaded by anything that I say. They may finally be forced to be vaccinated to save their jobs or to go to a football game or to sit in a restaurant or to go to church but their fury at having to do so will bring them to the breaking point. And it is people like me that they will take their ire out on.

So to get to the point where everyone is vaccinated will require some other solution than ridicule and coercion or maybe we will find out that not getting vaccinated is not that big a deal and we can live with it. But the thing that makes my understanding of what is going on so important is again, what I keep repeating to myself, that many anti vaxxers are good, ordinary, intelligent people with strong moral values just as are most vaxxers. I want all of us to sit at the Thanksgiving table and have a great time with each other, not to hate each other and be unable to even be civil to each other.

When I was in Swannanoa I thought this was an American problem, a byproduct of the sharp division between red and blue, Republican and Democrat which has turned us into opposing tribes, unable to agree on anything.

But then I come to Europe and the same tension is here, all over Europe. It is not an American problem, it is a human problem. This tension showed itself in the demonstrations on Saturday, in the small demonstration in Celle, but also in the huge demonstrations at the same time in Holland which led to riots.

Getting vaccinated is so safe and painless and is such good protection against Covid that I am baffled by resistance to it. So what I need to do for myself is to understand why good, intelligent, moral people feel the opposite. How can that be? That is what is happening as I sit here alone in my room and it matters as much to me as riding around North Germany taking photographs. How can good people with opposing viewpoints get along? The usual historical solution is revolution or war, but that doesn’t seem a solution to me. This is an issue that I am not going to resolve for anyone else. I am not planning to change the world. I just want to accept people I like who have opposing views that I intuitively feel are nuts, while they think the same of me. So that is what I will work on for tomorrow but even as I do, remember that this is my personal solution not yours, simply an account of what is going through my mind as I travel.