It’s as though everything in life has become politicized to the point of a sort of binary tribalism. You’re either a liberal or a conservative, a lockdown proponent or a COVID truther, and so on. It might as well be a choice between the Jets or the Sharks: “When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day…”
With all the confirmation bias, there’s little room left for nuance, for the seeking of a position that bridges the gap between extremes. There’s evidently no virtue in the mean, no merit to navigating the tricky course between the shoals — acknowledging, for example, that some precautions should be taken for the purposes of public health and safety but that severely damaged economies might well kill even more people than the virus. There is a seeming failure in our discourse to recognize it’s OK to believe both — and to figure out how best to act accordingly.
