Permission to Publicly Grieve

And what I can tell you is that, you know, I put up a couple of videos on TikTok and on Instagram, and it is so disheartening to me some of it. And I know that there are trolls and you know, and all of those things, but it is so disheart heartening to me to put up these videos that really encourage us to reflect on this time and people respond with like it was a hoax, it was the flu,

it was you know, it didn't matter. And I'm just like, the distortion and the misinformation, the chosen ignorance is just wildly disheartening. I don't know what else to say about it, but I do know that for the rest of us, particularly the wok F engaged wonderful audience that you are, that we need to be reminded of the trauma that we have gone through and continue to go through, to reflect on what we lost and also what we gained, right and how our lives have changed.

year over the last four years. And you know, so when she was teaching yoga this week, she did exactly what I did on the show, which was, you know, kind of have her students think about and reflect on the last four years where they were four years ago in twenty twenty, how their lives have changed. You know, Have they given any stock to that change, right? Like, are they asking their friends and their family how they really are, how they have been managing, you know, or

have we just gone back to business as usual. I'm good, things are great, you know lies and you know, and she said that it was really powerful that folks were really appreciative, because I think that we need to give ourselves and each other the permission, right to publicly be able to grieve in a lot of ways, the ways that our lives have been turned upside down, and that you know, many of us are looking for the opportunity to share our truth and be vulnerable about the ways

that we are different, about the losses that we have suffered, and about the purposeful changes that we have made, the shifts that we have made in our lives, you know. And I offer to all of you this coming weekend, like reach out to your friends, your family, you know, offer it up, you know, to ask people how they're doing. Man, it's been four years, Like isn't it wild? Like how

have you been managing? And just see what happens. Because unfortunately, without direct leadership from the top, giving us as a country the opportunity to collectively grieve, which I think would be incredibly powerful, it has been politicized. As evidence by some of the comments that you wouldn't see because I've deleted them because I don't want that shit lingering on my page. But to deny people the opportunity to grieve real loss of a life, of livelihood, of stability, is

to deny each other's humanity. And that's why we're in the predicament, the shit show that we're in right now because of the forces at play that are working to dismantle our humanity, our values, our shared morals. So how do we put those pieces back together? It begins with recognizing ourselves and each other, providing grace and space for necessary conversation. So coming up next my conversation with our friend,

our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel. Folks, you know that whenever we have the opportunity to speak with our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel, I am always thrilled, and I'm thrilled this week honestly because Jonathan. This month is the four year anniverse since COVID was named a global health pandemic by the WHO, by the CDC, and our worlds were altered in March of twenty twenty. And what I find so troubling as I do my own reflection because from my family, for folks, that we had

been listening to me for those four years. You know, March twenty twenty was when my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She went in for brain surgery the day before everything shut down, and thank god we were able to, you know, have the surgery, get her home and recover, and because of COVID, we were able for her to recover and heal as a full family. So for us it is a time of like deep reflection

and gratitude. But Jonathan, what I realize as I do my own reflections every year and my FAMI family does theirs, that collectively, as a country, we just pretend that this traumatic world stopping event where a million over a million Americans lost their lives didn't happen.

know I didn't get anything. I'm sorry, but this part of the story is like it just feels like, and I'm thinking of Eric Kleinenberg's new book, like the World broke and we never put it back together is kind of what it feels like. And so it's funny, like I'm going to give you an example that is not related to COVID for how I've been thinking, which is, and I think I've talked about this for a bit. It was like the middle of the night and I watched Ferris Buehler's Day Off. And the crazy thing was,

here's Ferris Buehler. He hangs out with his friends. He like ditches school, they steal the car, they go to the Cubs game, they go to a parade. But the whole thing is the movie was made like a year before cell phones, and so all these people are like doing all this stuff, but they couldn't conceive that they could have ever just called, Like they keep stopping to

go to a payphone or something. Farris Bueler would have been busted in five seconds if he had a phone had a day off, And so there was something that happened that irreparably, irreparably changed everybody's consciousness. And now when you watch it, you're like, why is this guy getting to ditch school?

So it's just funny that like things happen that change our perception, that happens all the time in big ways and small ways. And I feel like, for me, that's kind of the story of COVID, but in a really bad way, which is there are all these massive things that happened, like a million zillion people died and they're gone and there's no you know, it's funny, like think

about it. In the beginning, like we had music tributes and memories and it was kind of weird of the world, and all the opera singers got together and then everybody just it's just the loss of life was so an ending and overwhelming that everybody was we just have normalized it in a way. So part of it is the loss of life, but the other part is just the way it changed we relate to the world. Like people feel to me, and this is my question for you.

People feel less social, they feel less communal, they feel less they feel more tired, just rallying people to do things as harder. The perception of what it means to leave your apartment is just so different. The perception of what it means to work feels different. The perception of

what politics means is so different. And so for me, there's the massive things, which are death, and then there's the subtle things, which is are just how it changed how we think about things we never thought about, like going five days to a week in the office. Of course, yeah that's what I do and I like my colleagues and stuff. And now people don't want to go in two days a week and they're working from home and they're or isolated but maybe more productive. Like it's just

everything everything changed our perception to me. To me, that's the enduring thing which I think really has profound political implications.

you know, you know where he is. That also just makes me sad about the loss of anonymity in a deep way as well. But to the perception piece about how we work, how we live, how we gather, how we connect, all of these fundamental things that make us huge women, that make our society tick have changed and we don't reflect on it at all. And I think

that that is something. And I don't know, because you travel internationally more for work than I ever do, and I want to know from your conversations and travels do other countries have a deeper reflection because of and people love to say, like, you know, Donald Trump didn't change anything,

ball blah. And I'm just like the fact that we don't have a remembrance for those that we lost to COVID, the fact that there isn't like a moment of silence collectively every year, the fact that there is going to be no real coverage on the news of those that we lost and remembering this time and kind of like, you know, having this reflection is deeply American because we love to forget things. We love to bury them and

pretend that they didn't happen. I e slavery, right. So I'm just wondering for you, you, with your international community, is there a difference in terms of how people look at this anniversary.

We started teaching it in the second midst. I spoke yeah, and you spoke a munch And so for me, the most telling thing and I'll get to the international thing in a second, but let's just hold on to the first thought for one more minute, which is for me, the most powerful And I'll tell you in a bit. We stopped teaching that class. It got too intense because people in the beginning and they were all like, we

are the world and we're on the same team. And by the end, like to get people to even talk about masks, they were going to kill each other, like it was so people were so divided, And that's part of the story for me, is one thing about the pandemic. Another thing is that we spend so much more time on social media and on our computers and our phones than we did before, even though we had them available, and so it's so much easier to divide people, like

the level of like manipulation. Like remember in the beginning of the pandemic, every's like, oh there's misinformation and disinformation and we have to stop it for real everything. But now like where it's like we are so susceptible to being divided in every way possible. And so that's number one.

But number two and I'm just rambling crazy today, but the most powerful thing we would do in this class, I'm going to ask you this question is we would say, do we would tell the students look at a video clip of you before the pandemic, or if you don't have one. Look at a picture of you, but look at you know, a clip. What didn't you know that you know now? In other words, what information or knowledge

or perception? The way people would do this for like war, like before and after the war, what didn't you know? Look at yourself before the war? Oh, I was so innocent. What didn't you know before the pandemic? That you would tell yourself now? And we would ask we had one hundred and fifty students in the class. We would tell them to go back to their prior self and tell them a story about what you know now that you

didn't know that now? Do you matter if I put you on the spot and ask you that question?

community but being in person is something that like is needed, right. I think that that's the thing that I tell myself because I'm a very social person and you know, a person that if I allow my calendar to dictate, my life would be filled with stuff to do all the time. And so the other part is that like you don't have to have busy work, like you can just slow down, right, Like that is you know that your productivity is not your work. So those are two things that I would

like say, what did your students say? What did you say?

wellbeing are just there. You know. I felt like I lived in an enlightened era because you know, my dad escaped the Holocaust and we came to America and this is democracy and all these kind of things, and I just I just I just would tell myself that the bonds are are are strong, but they're much more susceptible than you ever realized about everything things you really assumed

as core of civilization. So for me, that's it. The students were it was really sad because most of them said, like, my life could get derailed at any moment, you know, or like, you know, because a lot of them lost scholarships or lost years of playing sports or lost things like that. So for them it was kind of like shit could go south at any minute, and so it

was more like prepare that kind of thing. But it was also you know, we love zoom and we have all these technologies and you could spend more time on your iPhone than you ever wanted, but I'd be curious now to do it again. It was great the first three years, and then there was just the division in the class got to be really intense. And it wasn't

just division about COVID. It was division about race, the things that we couldn't that we easily talked about, Like we easily talked about race that first year, and by the third year, I would say stuff like, you know, it turns out like tons of working class, poor white Americans died of COVID, And then one student would say, well, they deserved it for not getting vaccines, and somebody else would say, you're anti white race. Like it just got

really intense, and that's what you do in college. You talk about it, but it yeah, yeah, but it was just you know, we just thought, like, man, maybe we can reframe this. So now I have a more cheerful class about guns in America. But no, So it was just interesting to see that. So I would say that to me that what I'm talking about is a kind of global phenomenon in some ways. Now I think America

it's more intense in a way. It certainly feels more intense because there was this movement rising, so all these things happened about you know, we just have it just happened that this happened when Trump was president, and then the sedition to overthrow the government and all these things and George Floyd. Everything happened that kind of manifested it. But I have, as you know, a lot of relatives

in Israel. They were like in the beginning out there clapping on their balconies for the healthcare workers, and now that country has been like ripped in a million pieces. And it's very similar. Right, A lot of the hardcore right wing people are buying guns, and they're anti science, and they're obviously pulling them into even worse war. So this idea of like we're all going to come together there. I know, people are just becoming quite tribal because this

thing spread. I have a lot of colleagues in Europe. I guess the one place, and I don't know, this is naive maybe, but I'm part of a project in Scandinavia where they're doing this thing called the COVID Narratives Project, which is like, what's the narrative of COVID that people can memorialize and talk about and imply. And so I'm

curious where Scandinavia fits in. Now I'll tell you My theory about all this is that there's this sociological theory called social cohesion, which is basically that countries that have shared infrastructure or build shared infrastructure during something like a pandemic,

end up coming out of it better. An example not from COVID is like the UK during World War II, for example, you know, London was being bombed and blockaded, and the British government said, Okay, we're going to nationalize access to healthcare, We're going to democratize access to food because everybody should be taken care of at a time when we're all facing a common enemy. And it turned out then when World War Two ended, they had the framework for the NHS and social welfare programs and all

these kinds of things that helped the country. And Scandinavia is kind of similar, like there's good infrastructure and a bunch of other things too. So I would bet that countries that have like shared collaborative resources and don't like all go like this is my resource and not yours, which is what we're doing. Yeah, I bet those are the countries. But this that reminds me. I'll check back in on Scandinavian. I'll report back.

leadership is in this country. And that is something that I took wholeheartedly for granted, even going through the Bush years right where you know, you had a president fly over black people dying in New Orleans because of Katrina, right and not sending in aid. But somehow, you know, you have celebrities that are sending in eighteen wheeler trucks

to provide water. Right, So it is to recognize how different I think that America would be right now if Donald Trump had not been the president, had we not had a president that had turned the virus into a racial slur, had we not had a president that told people not to wear a mask, and that you know, to keep states open was to liberate them right and did not put the public health forward, told people to

shoot up, bleach and light. You know that if you removed Donald Trump, the Trump administration and MAGA, if it had been Hillary Clinton, if it had been Obama and it happened during the Obama years, like what a vast difference I think that we would be in right now. I think that America would have been stronger and more united because we would have seen COVID as like as shared responsibility instead. I mean, you would have still had those people who want a grift in a price gouge,

and that happens all of the time. But I think that there would have been much more of a community building and shared humanity if we had had the right leadership.

to like overturn the entire Affordable Care Act. They blocked healthcare, they blocked medicaid reform in red states, like all these ways. They signaled that it's not just politics as usual, but it's an opportunity for us to like get ahead, you know, by profiteering in a way in this horrible moment. And so it became what's called a polarizing crisis where people's divisions really were enhanced. Now, I'll say that the thing about COVID is that it just went on so long,

like it was almost beyond comprehension. Usually people think of before and after and then we can do a memorial, and then we can do a statue and all these things, and it just defied all that because it's still floating around. And so I think part of the issue was it just wasn't conceivable for us, and it certainly wasn't conceivable for people like Trump. Just what was being faced in a certain kind of way. And then there's of course all this retrospective like, oh, of course I knew that

we weren't this wasn't going to work. Of course I knew vaccines and all this kind of crap. But like, everybody was just scrambling it. It was a you know, I trust the people who know what they're doing, but everybody was just scrambling. It wasn't like we had a model for it. So I completely agree with you about leadership. You know, ironically, economically we came out better than anybody. But there's a kind of interesting reason why that is, which is that we had migrants who did a lot

of the jobs and kept our economy going up. And so a lot of people that are now if the Republic is wudn't get reblocked. But but so they're all there are all these stories. So it's, man, it's so intense. It's like this half hour flew by, because.

get through this moment. But even to be on the other side, I can't really say to your point that we've made it to the other side, do you know what I'm saying? Like I feel like, I don't know, maybe in another six years, when it's been ten years, who knows where America, our democracy, like our you know where we will be at all. But it's just it's wild to reflect on your twenty nineteen self and today. So I'll give you the last thoughts.

the shadow of a functioning public health infrastructure. Trump is now saying if they win, they're going to destroy the CDC, They're going to end every vaccine thing, They're going to end all this stuff, and so, you know, I would just say that the lessons are still pretty urgent about why the election matters and public health, it would seem to be like on the top three of the list.

It's not for a lot of people, but it should be because if we do away with research about how to treat illness and public health and structure and stuff like that, then ten years from.

well being. So to me, that's a pretty straightforward choice.