DECEMBER 23, THURSDAY

CONFUSION AND CHOICE

Thursday evening, the Mosher family celebrated Christmas at 15 Melrose Avenue, Asheville, my son‘s house. For as long as we have been a family we have celebrated Christmas on the day when Germans do because Kathe, the keeper of family traditions has celebrated Chrismas as she did as a girl in Winsen, Aller, where Susie and I just visited. On December 6 shoes left out overnight would be filled with small presents and candy and in the later afternoon we would gather in the living room with the father of the family called away for some reason. The rest of the family would be listening to a Christmas story when out of the sky, down past the roof, would arrive a basket full of small presents. It was magical and beautiful. And then a little later the father of the family would reappear and be told about this miraculous event. This didn‘t happen at anyone else‘s house, which didn’t make in any less real, just ours until the children grew up and it stopped happening.

Christ was celebrated on the American eve of Christmas, but for our family Christmas, itself. For the first few years when the children were small the tree was decorated exactly as it was in Germany, without colored lights but with red candles that were lit and hanging red apples and straw stars. Then the candles were blown out, because our house was made of wood and German houses made of masonry. And then the presents would be picked out by the youngest and distributed and we would go around the circle opening one present at a time so that everyone would see it and we could all comment.

Last night we celebrated German Christmas one day early because we had to be in Rehoboth Beach for the Mahy family Christmas on the American Christmas Day of December 25th and the ten hour drive to Rehoboth Beach would take all day Saturday.

That was the continued the German tradition last night as my son Tom, his wife Kathy, and daughters Caroline and Hannah sat around their 8 foot high Christmas tree in their large living room. Daughter Susie and her man, Todd, was there and me, but without the spirit of German Christmases past, Kathe.

But her spirit was there. Susie gave Kathy, Caroline and Hannah scarves that Kathe had knit but not finished in the year before she died, which Susie had finished and put tassels on. The presents were beautiful and thoughtful but Christmas was not quite the same. Yet, we went home satisfied and happy.

But hanging over our celebration was not only the absence of Kathe, who died this year, but the 800,000 families who have a missing family member at Christmas because of Covid.

But beyond the pain caused by Covid is the confusion over what any of us need to do to avoid getting or spreading Covid, confusion caused by the conflicting advice of scientists on how transmissible it is and how severely it affects people. Last night we sat together as family, close to each other, unmasked. We were all vaccinated and Tom‘s family had all tested negative. We felt safe even though I am 84, overweight, with mild diabetes and a candidate for severe symptoms and Todd is immunocomprised with type 1 diabetes.

Then we read this morning as we rode through North Carolina that in Marin County, California, recently, after a Christmas party of 65 people, all vaccinated and all having tested negative the day of the party, that 28 of those present have come down with Covid. So much for being safe. And this afternoon we read that within ten weeks a booster shot drops to 40% protection. So Todd and I are not much protected by our booster shots, either.

And all of this as we drove through the day toward Rehoboth Beach where the Mahy family, Todd and his three sisters with their families are going to spend a week in one house celebrating Christmas and being together, a recipe for multiple infections if there ever was one. We love each other, are taking every precaution except the most certain precaution, staying at home.

We are confused. All of America, all of the world, is confused about what is safe to do at a time when we want very much to be together. The confusion comes partly because half of America is listening to people they trust who tell them not to worry, that vaccination is more dangerous than non vaccination, that wearing a mask is foolish. While the other half trusts the doctors even when the doctors are forced by science to keep changing their advice. None of us are stupid, none of us are deliberately doing the wrong thing. We are just confused. We want to make the right choice but don‘t know what it is.

And then it occurs to me that this is not simply a Covid problem, this is a human problem from the time we are born until the day we die. How do we make any of our big choices in life with certainty, how do we know we are making the right choices?

Most of us adopt the conventions of wherever we are dropped to earth. Our parents are the experts who tell us what choices to make and who make sure that we adopt the same conventions in which they were brought up. We have trust in our parents and the tribe in which we are brought up. We can only really make choices if we have alternatives which are presented as being viable and acceptable alternatives? If we have no alternatives we are not making choices? We rely through faith in the family and culture we are born into. This is what we are certain of.

This is not true of everyone. If you are born gay and your culture says that being born gay is a perversion or a sin, you are forced to make choices and when you are supported by other gay people you are likely to choose their way over the culture you were brought up in. If you are trans the choices you must make are even more difficult. If your subculture is fundamental Christian or strict Amish or conservative Jew and the wider culture is not, you are forced to make choices. If you have lived in several countries with different conventions you see alternatives. But most of us make no choices at all, our parents and our tribe make our choices for us. It is only when people we trust disagree that we are able to make choices.

But when we live in a time of great change when ways of doing things and cultural conventions are in constant change because of changing technology we are likely to be as confused as we are at this time when Covid is so confusing us. So our confusion over Covid is very similar to our confusion over any of our life choices in a rapidly changing world.

Neither of the choices that people around me are presented with give much certainty. MAGA traditional values are something half the country is holding onto for dear life, with one of the threats being educated, elite experts including scientists who threaten the rock, of religion or patriotism, that MAGA fundamentalist are holding on to dearly in almost every way. Madison Cawthorn in his cheery Christmas greeting email asks for prayer as a solution, while threatening revolution, and assuring me that we, as Americans, live in the greatest country on earth. He is offering this certainty. No, MAGA people along with Madison are not going to give in to these people and be vaccinated.

It seems to me that at times of of rapid change and complete uncertainty, what we intuitively most need, more than anything is certainty, not rational certainty but emotional certainty, a rock in the storm, support of our family, support of our tribe, something to hold on to.

But the liberal science based alternative brings no comforting certainty either: global warming, tech and trade that makes jobs vanish, rational explanations for gender differences, chance evolution as an explanation for why we are here and why we will disappear, a universe that is unfathomably huge and in space and time dwarfing and certainty that we can come up with.

To me, anyway, neither alternative offers me much certainty, so probably that is the reason that ignoring the science warnings and the need to keep the pandemic at bay, and ignoring MAGA‘s choice of misinformation in order to maintain certainty, all of us here at the Mahy family Christmas simply want to huddle together with friends and family with the one certainty, love, that makes the risks worthwhile and somewhere else MAGA people are doing the same thing.