As you are making decisions about your part in fighting white supremacy, one common (but certainly not exclusive) failing among church members is backing the wrong horse. This is so prevalent I am going to spend two posts on different examples, but first we talk about input and attitude.
Last week I read an opinion piece in The Oregonian that likened seniors' attempts to get vaccination appointments to The Hunger Games. I am not going to link to it due to paywall issues, but I can point out three problems with it.
The complaint was centered around age-based eligibility for seniors being lowered from 80 to 65, even though not everyone over 80 had gotten it yet. It made other complaints about state processes, including seniors often wading through a web site and then not getting an appointment.
This is a thing that happens. It also happens to people in the other groups, like first responders and teachers, many of whom are younger and more tech-savvy. In many cases, it happens because there is a flood of demand, and when a new opportunity goes out, the appointments fill up quickly.
The editorial even admitted toward the end that the biggest issue with the vaccine rollout was supply, which is coming closer to a solution, but has not been something that Kate Brown could change on her own. Despite that admission, the overall impression of the article was that seniors were being ill-served by the governor's incompetence.
Without arguing that there is no room for improvement in distribution, the opinion piece missed some points.
I am sure that it is true that seniors are more likely to run into issues with scheduling apps and transportation to vaccination events. I do not believe that is a reason to wait on expanding eligibility.
One reason -- not dealt with in the article -- was that there is racial bias in life expectancy. Many Black and brown people never make it to 80. Technically, based on 2014 CDC data, white life expectancy is 79.4, but they have a good 4 years on African Americans and Native Americans. Lowering the age to 65 makes the vaccine available to a more racially diverse population. Since the data has been very clear that the risk of COVID-19 infection and death is disproportionately borne by people of color, this is an important expansion.
(Solving medical and health inequality is also important; but that will take longer.)
https://www.thebalance.com/the-racial-life-expectancy-gap-in-the-u-s-4588898
Remember, while the elderly -- at least those over 80 -- were prioritized, they were not the only priority. My 78-year old mother has been vaccinated because she is in a senior care facility, and given the potential risk, those facilities were prioritized. With all of the residents being easily accessible, that went very smoothly, even though many of the residents would have struggled with the technology.
One recent development is that some clinics will also take the adult family members living in the same household of other eligible people, like teachers or health care workers. This may be a great way to get those seniors who are living with family to vaccination events; by opening it up to the family members they are living with. That won't help with seniors who live alone, but as different methods prove more effective, let's learn from that and expand. It really will save lives.
The opinion piece did not mention that some of those slots being missed by seniors over the age of 80 were being taken by teachers and rescuers, and people whose jobs put them at risk. I personally might prioritize retail and restaurant workers over seniors. Would that be the right choice? I am not positive.
There is room for disagreement. My initial response to schools opening up this year (rather than just waiting until fall) was to disagree. However, I know a parent with a student who has started hybrid school, and he says it has been good for the students. Well, I am not a parent, maybe I don't know.
There has to be a willingness to admit when you don't know, but there should also be a desire to know.
I admit it is hard. There is a lot of information to sort through, and it is astonishing what some people believe now. Like a lot of people after getting their shots are making jokes about wanting to buy Microsoft. They think that's a joke, but there are people who believe it.
There are things that can help with media literacy. It is no longer safe to assume that media will report factually and clearly, because if they get more readers through Hunger Games analogies, they may not resist that temptation.
Going with the examples in this piece, it is a hard but necessary lesson that based on our history, most things are not racially neutral, so the impact of race must be considered for any fairness, but then many people will tell you that acknowledging that is the real racism. Do you do the right thing or the easy thing?
(Or the super wrong thing of banning critical race theory education in order to move us backward.)
However, beyond merely sorting the information that you have available, there is also a question of intention. This is why I mention attitude, as well as input.
The opinion piece in question only considered the needs of people over the age of 80, and with that narrow view it was easy to decide efforts were insufficient. There are other needs.
This is not merely about acknowledging that there are difficult choices to make. There is a common tendency to take an adversarial approach to news, where if it is against your person it is definitely bad, and there is always a reason to think bad of most of them.
I notice this bias more against Democrats, partly because I am one, but also because it comes from both the conservative side and also the side that is so "progressive" or "leftist" that to merely say "liberal" would be an insult.
I don't personally care if you like Democrats or affiliate, but I do care about things getting better. I care about the pandemic getting under control. I care about people having enough food and resources to survive, and do better than survival.
I have literally seen people root for the Democrats to insist on the minimum wage inclusion because then the stimulus would fail and that would clear the way for those Democrats to be replaced by Progressives. That could happen, but being replaced by Republicans seems more likely. If you don't believe everything got worse after Trump was elected with having McConnell in power already being bad enough... that's a much longer discussion; I don't have time for that here.
My focus is that we need to want good things for people. There is plenty of room for disagreement about the best way to accomplish good, but that should never turn into wanting suffering or celebrating suffering because it scores a point.
It is more important to do right than to be right.
And when you accept that, then you probably do write opinion pieces differently, and more respectfully.
I want to be clear: I am not saying that you can't point out a problem if you don't have a solution; sometimes talking about the problem is how we get the solution.
But there is still room for understanding when a decision might be hard, or if a bigger fault might not be a former chief executive not ordering more vaccines when he had the chance, or taking any action whatsoever to save lives. No, it doesn't help now, except that if we get into the habit of accurately assessing where we went wrong and what would be right, that might be the sort of thing that helps us make it through this mess.
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