ONLY LOVE CAN CONQUER HATE…WHAT'S GOING ON: A CREATIVE ESSAY

DR. LAVADA U. TAYLOR, PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND COUNSELING

-written from my mother’s living room sofa, December, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic still has me gasping for air, trying to figure out: what’s going on? To be clear, my thoughts are consumed with the pandemic itself and its social, cultural, psychological, and political aspects. The hundreds of thousands of lives lost and families economically crippled by its effects.

Urban, rural, and poor school-age children who were already at least two years behind the digital divide are now four or more years behind as they fall deeper in the cracks of opportunity with seemingly little hopes of catching up or coming out. Or, the way that a right to healthcare or lack thereof illuminates real gulfs as a result of access to: treatment, quality of care, and the possibilities of preventive medicine/therapeutics along racial and class lines.

Voices repeatedly note there’s far too many of us dying…

Ultimately my mind is consumed by the way these events didn't bring working class folks together but rather became a means used to keep us not only apart from but vehemently fighting against one another.

Emotions raging and sprung not from the debate of how decades of oppression were rearing its ugly head in ways that showed the number of those impacted by and dying from COVID most often were those historically minoritized: working and working poor, people of color. Or that, in this group, those hit the hardest financially, emotionally, and psychologically were single working mothers.

As voices cry out, they’re far too many of you dying…

Instead of addressing these ills, talks on the nightly news remain focused on who is and who is not taking the vaccine. Being unvaccinated was not a matter of choice, nor could it be based upon memories of the 1940’s Manhattan Protect, where folks were literally injected with plutonium, uranium, and polonium to see what would happen. Nor by more recent memories of emergency rooms using artificial blood in the name of experimental technology without patient consent. Nor the legitimate right to religious freedom. Nor the ongoing reported COVID-19 breakthrough cases, where those who have received two and three shots still find themselves sick with COVID-19.

Rather, being unvaccinated has been constructed as a threat to the physical wellbeing of the vaccinated. The unvaccinated are making the vaccinated sick. Yet in the name of science in its infinite art of questioning, could it not be that the vaccine is not quite ready to do what it originally was proposed to do: protect us from COVID-19? A notion casting further doubt in the minds of the unvaccinated.

Voices repeatedly note there’s far too many of us dying…

The US vaccination panacea: Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J, whose moving targets promised, at least initially, no more masks and an end to the pandemic...but only some should take it—oh no, all should take it. But taking it isn't enough; we need to keep taking it...like the movie/novel The Giver, taking “the shot” daily to help us to forever forget our memory or the pains of memory. A vaccine anesthesia to cloud our social ills as we fight with each other: the vaccinated vs the non-vaccinated.

As voices cry out, they’re far too many of you dying…

I, too, was caught in this web with family and friends who loved me dearly and wanted to hit me on my head and make me take the vaccine...it would be for my good, and more importantly, it would protect them from me. Their arguments never made much sense to me.

Widely publicized stats of the unvaccinated were and remain alarming. In our community of Northwest Indiana as I write this poem, only 19 beds out of 210 are available in intensive care units. In the past week, Lake County, with three of the poorest communities of color, reported 337 new COVID-19 infections. 71 new cases were reported in Porter County and 40 new cases in LaPorte County. According to the NWI Times, since the start of the pandemic, unvaccinated individuals account for 97.l% of COVID infections, 99.94% of hospitalizations, and 99.97% of those who died from COVID-19.

Voices repeatedly note there’s far too many of us dying…

So, how was I a threat to them? Wasn’t I the one who was not vaccinated, at least at the time? Weren’t they the one with the inoculation of hope, life, end promise? Why were they being told to fear me? More importantly, why were they being ‘taught’ to fear me? It made no sense other than for the expected end for them, my family being able to do what the government could not do...simultaneously evoke two emotions, love and fear, to make me take a vaccine that really was not and has not yet proven to be the pandemic's grand panacea.

For only love can conquer hate…

Yet, in the ongoing confusion and turmoil, I still find myself asking, “What's going on?" I find myself wondering and looking for connections between love/fear shadowing so much of what we have come to understand about the pandemic—who is worthy to live, 37 | What’s Going On and who should we watch die because of their choice not to take the vaccine? And the ways we are being taught to interact or not interact with each other.

For only love can conquer hate…

A realization of how inextricably linked are love and fear. For only through love can fear exist, and fear can only be conquered through love. It is here in the crossroads both literally and figuratively that I choose to love both the vaccinated and the nonvaccinated instead of fearing either. I choose to openly and unapologetically not fear my brothers and sisters whose lived conditions with oppression have been augmented in the midst of the vaccine debates and stimulus checks. I choose to love both because, in the words of the late Marvin Gaye:

“There’s far too many of you dying…What’s goin’ on?”