Welp. I think the divination might be stronger than my will to fight against it ^^; As for "not learning from mistakes", I ONCE AGAIN left the house planning a string of family events ending with shopping, without the shopping list. So... after a lovely visit to the park, Mike parked far enough away from the house that our toddler wouldn't know where we were, and I hoofed it in the rain to pick up the list. I think this is the THIRD time we've done this, I DID NOT LEARN. Sheesh.
The other cards... sigh. They, too, were correct. First, we had a very unstructured afternoon, where my husband watched a bunch of reviews of new video games. I am uninterested in that world nowadays and did not watch. Instead I did my daily French marathon and read through Reddit - Sunday is my Reddit day. (And limiting it to Sunday has been GREAT for my mental health, FYI!)
And... both the other cards came true, at once. Because I didn't practice sufficient self-discipline during our unstructured afternoon, I went to the reddit forum I have been avoiding for months... r/portland. And of course it was mostly happiness at all the rain and pictures of people's dogs. But... there was also a post, by one individual, a very Portland example of the self-appointed Good People.
She (as it was of course a she, I didn't need to see any pronouns) was a volunteer at one of the mass vaccination sites, and posted "In order to get to 70% vaccinated, we have to talk with and try to UNDERSTAND the people in our lives who don't want to get vaccinated! It's the only way we can CONVINCE them and PROTECT EVERYONE and RESPONSIBLY go back to normal!" Several people on reddit did the reddit thing and bluntly stated "No, we don't have to care. They've made their choice. They're all too stupid to live. Let them die and let's go live our lives again."
And the funny thing... the unacknowledged feelings, or at least the ones I've been quietly wrestling with, all bubbled up to the surface at once. You see - I would have thought the redditors casually wishing death on their neighbors would have bothered me. But they were a RELIEF to read. At least those assholes are going to leave their neighbors ALONE and go back to a normal goddamn life. They are also too lazy to put together anything like a vaccine passport system. They're going to feel superior while achieving nothing, as per the usual reddit way.
But that woman, that volunteer, that true believer. That woman. I bet she truly, truly believes every word she wrote in that post. She is spending all her time and energy doing everything she possibly can to get needles in the arms of every single person she knows. She JUST wants them all to be vaccinated, for everyone's SAFETY... with an untested, brand-new-on-this-earth substance that hasn't even been through enough trials to ascertain its effect on human fertility. Just for starters! Which already has been *proven* to cause significant cases of myocarditis in young men (I consider Israel's side effect reporting as the most cutting-edge and reliable out there). She doesn't - can't - perhaps even won't understand - that everyone getting vaccinated right now who is under 60 and doesn't have a comorbidity is risking their health MORE, not less. She believes in vaccinations creating herd immunity the way an Evangelical believes in salvation by faith. But unlike the Evangelical, she is using every last shred of her Goodness (tm) for something that can - that has already! - caused real health problems in the here-and-now. She's actively demonstrating what road we all get to walk down when we pave it with our "good intentions".
I used to think that people who joined NGOs, or went abroad on volunteer trips, etc. with the best of intentions were a bit naive, but mostly harmless. Oh, how my perspective has changed.
It's not hard, for someone raised with liberal political views (as I was), to sketch out a scenario where "the right" seizes power and enacts fascism. I still don't think that scenario is impossible - I'm half convinced the missteps of the left are going to summon it, demon-style, around roughly 2024 - there's real danger there. But I've finally realized that "the left" can bring about the authoritarian state just as quick, just as strong, just as terrifying. They'd just do it with a smile, telling us all that they just want to HELP! They just want everyone to be SAFE! And you didn't really want all that responsibility of making choices for yourself, did you? You might make the WRONG choice, and we can't have THAT now can we! They'd do it exactly like that woman ALREADY IS DOING. Just as smugly, just as convinced of their absolute intellectual superiority, totally comfortable in their absolute power and patting themselves on the back as to what Good People (tm) they are. The vaccine passport planners ought to hire her! Oh, who am I kidding - they already have. And boy... is she EVER ready, to do her duty to HELP.
It's a weird place to be in - to be praying as best I know how that American society's inertia and laziness and the government's rapidly decreasing tax coffers end up overwhelming the instinct my own 'side' has to HELP. To come to the conclusion that the very obvious path all this is paving for our medical system to pre-emptively turn away the majority of the poor from medical treatment - and for the Good People (tm) to shrug that off as What They Deserve - is the best possible outcome left to us. I have known logically for some time that our "everyone can always come to the emergency room for treatment!" bylaws, lacking Medicare For All, were going to vanish (or be vanished) some way or another. But to see it actually begin to happen... and for it to be the BETTER outcome, because what the group of people I once considered myself a part of would do instead is WORSE... oh, what has happened to my society? :(
Is 2021 going to continue being a parade of randomized 2020 trauma bubbles popping up? Sigh... I already know the answer.
And the hardest of all - I'm going to have to keep intimately navigating these Good People (tm) in my own life... indefinitely. I've sadly but pre-emptively stopped talking to any of my friends who are "pro-science" in that way. I don't hate them, I wish them well, but I don't want to deal with them right now. My father was pushed off, thankfully, with logic (eventually) and my mother is an honest-to-god anti-vaxxer nowadays so whatever else I have to deal with from her, it won't be that. But my mother-in-law is an RN, believes completely that there are no issues with the vaccine, and eagerly told me that if I get vaccinated now, my future child "will have the antibodies". Uh... will they? Is that precisely how the mRNA works?? And, how can she say, when studies haven't even been done yet, whether or not it might prevent me from getting pregnant at all? Or whether those "antibodies" will disfigure or abort my child in the womb? And all this, when I have next to NO chance of getting so much as complications from COVID, given my age and health situation???
But... I will need my mother-in-law, in order for our family to survive adding another child, especially in that brutal first year. It's the biggest unspoken source of tension in my life at this moment - that my mother-in-law is pushing something which could very possibly kill my child if I acquiesce... but I also need her to help me raise that child. She has NO IDEA that this is the situation she's putting me in - no, she's a Good Person (tm), of course. And for her to comprehend the vaccinations, which she is actively sending a whole crop of college students at her clinic to go get, in any less of a favorable light would probably cause a system crash. I don't want that either. She is a good person in so many ways - so much more giving and reliable and helpful than my own mentally ill mother. But I can't compromise on this.
So, she asks my husband about it incessantly on the phone, and he deflects, and I pirouette, and we all continue the dance. He's getting the J&J vaccine next week - it's a slightly better tested vaccine delivery method, I haven't heard about it affecting male fertility, and I pray that no other nightmarish side effects arise - if he panics and goes to the hospital for any reason, that will be half our savings gone at a stroke (gods willing, not with a stroke). He, too, doesn't truly understand what a risk he's taking. He trusts his mother's word exactly as much as he did when he was a child. (She has not yet comprehensively betrayed him, as my parents have me.) So I can't go against his mother any more than I already have, and still keep her in our lives, and my marriage strong. I've chosen to shut my mouth about it and save myself--and hopefully the baby too--and let it be his body, his choice.
I mean... we live in the middle of so much uncertainty. Maybe I am completely wrong. Maybe in December I catch COVID while pregnant, end up on an ECMO, and rue the day I thought I knew better than my mother-in-law. I don't know. There is no such thing as "knowing". All I can do is analyze the data from as many angles as possible, run it through my common sense, and make the best choice available to me at this moment. Right now I believe my future unborn child is in more danger from this vaccine than I am in from COVID, and am living my life accordingly. I'm also taking vitamins, eating healthy, exercising, forming new and more positive social bonds, and trying to get in as good health as I possibly can. I'm hedging every last bet. It's all I can do.
And... this all bubbled up to the surface today because of checking goddamn r/portland. A pox upon it!! Though even I have to admit, as much as I hate modern technology... none of this is the software's fault.
These divinations keep churning up chunks of karma that I'd been putting off dealing with. And for every one I work through, my mind gets clearer, and my heart gets calmer. The SOP also really seems to be helping. So as painful as all this reflection is... I can feel myself getting stronger. That's exactly what I hoped for. So... I am grateful.
Let's quickly get tomorrow's reading done, I've gotta faceplant.
Me: 4 of Spades (Death) - The Cycle of Creation, Destruction, and Renewal
Situation: 10 of Clubs - A Responsibility or Burden
Outcome: 8 of Hearts (The Moon) - Subtlety, Mystery, Instinct
OK... I can see the shape of tomorrow, I think. I may still be working through some of this tomorrow in my own head. I need to pick up the threads of the Ecosophian meet-up and move it forward - a responsibility I've taken on, though a joyful one. And hopefully tomorrow, I will make serious progress on my candidacy statement, which is turning into a recitation of my own religious awakening, a process of mystery if there ever was one. OK! Good work, my psyche! And now... to sleep!
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