I had an MRI yesterday; will that make me resonate with you? I didn’t think so. The test was scheduled for 2:45 and I couldn’t eat for four hours beforehand so I had what was for me a big breakfast. I finished off the bacon, that means I have to buy more. The worst part of the test was having to drink Metamucil, it’s like drinking mud with phlegm. I had to fight to keep it down. I knew I didn’t have to dread drinking the barium before the test. It’s not that thick horrible stuff I used to drink before Upper GI X-Rays. What was awkward was that I had to sit in the waiting room unmasked. I had to drink three bottles, so it was not practical to keep putting the mask on and off. I felt a bit self-conscious as the only unmasked person in the room. I’ll come back to that later.
The MRI itself is nothing. As usual I had to fight to stay awake. The device is pure white, so you see the same thing no matter where you look, with one exception, there is one small hole. That draws your eye and creates and illusion, even when you are not moving the hole seems to move which my visual system interpreting as me moving. I knew I wasn’t as it was announced every time I moved, and you could hear it. I love watching my brain work.
I got myself treats after the test. I stopped at Dunkin’ for iced coffee and Golden Krust for a jerk chicken patty. I make jerk chicken, but it never comes out as spicy as the patties. My neighborhood is not quite Caribbean enough to have Caribbean restaurants. Almost everyone in both places wore masks. It’s just a 15 minute-walk from me but the masking rate is so much higher. My guess is that it’s because all the people that work at Montefiore Hospital set the norm so even people who don’t work there follow suit.
I gave myself two more culinary treats, for dinner I made matzoh brei pizza. That’s still a work in progress, this time I put it in the oven for 10 minutes, next time I’ll try eight. The only real issue with it is that you have to eat it with a knife and fork which as a New Yorker strikes me as wrong. Baking it in the oven after frying on the stovetop is the most important improvement I’ve made. The cheese gets just as hot as in real pizza. For dessert I had Entenmann’s chocolate chips loaf cake ala mode. The MRI is not traumatic or even difficult so there was no reason to indulge myself other than the joy of indulging myself. I heartily suggest self-indulgence for self-indulgence’s sake. It’s good for your soul if you do that now and then, not every day.
Now back to the contrasting rates of mask-wearing in adjacent neighborhoods. People like to think of themselves as rational, and to attribute the actions of others to rational thought. People like to think that but it’s irrational. Research has shown repeatedly that people don’t carefully weigh the evidence and then come to conclusions. What people really do is make their decisions then look for reasons to justify them. We are not rational as much as rationalizing.
The reality is that people don’t decide to mask or vaccinate by rational processes but follow the social norms. The best indicator of whether you vaccinate is if your neighbors vaccinate. That’s not to say that everyone just follows the crowd, but so many do that it swamps other reasons. That means it’s a nonlinear phenomenon driven by feedback loops. Those are notoriously unpredictable, slight changes in initial conditions can lead to large changes in results. To make it more complicated our neighbors are not just determined by physical proximate but my perceptions of group membership. Early in the pandemic I saw friends on the far left, I have more of them than on the right, speaking against masking. Their initial reaction was to see masking as the establishment position, so they were against it. Then it became clear that it was the right that became the side against masking and the anti-mask elements of the left got quiet as they followed their tribe.
We are divided into more than two tribes and each of us belong to more than one. This is a test of which identity is the most important. It’s not universal, and none of us think that way, but it’s how things usually work. I can see this in myself when it comes to baseball. I’m an analytical progressive but also an old-school fan. I love the Crash Davis’s speech in Bull Durham, “I believe there should be constitutional amendments banning the DH and artificial turf.” As an old-schooler and an NL fan the DH was an anathema. The use of the DH in the NL in 2020 changed that. It became normalized. Long-time opponents grew to accept it, which gave me leave to. Perhaps most significantly I saw that so many of the anti-DH camp were also in the political reactionary camp. In the war of identities, the progressive in me won. I still know plenty of political progressives who are against the DH, but as it becomes universal, they’ll come to accept it. Nothing is every that simple, I still feel guilty for accepting it.
This has practical consequences. The worst thing for those of us who want everyone to get vaccinated can do is ridicule those that aren’t vaccinated. When we do that, we are like those that display Confederate Flags, we are defining out tribe as being against theirs. This will make people less likely to get vaccinated, not more. I know it’s hard. I’m naturally sarcastic and acerbic. I love verbally eviscerating those that disagree with me. I do it all the time. That doesn’t make it right. There’s been a lot of research on how to convince people that disagree with you, and they all show that the first thing to do is listen to those that disagree and show that you understand where they are coming from. When we ridicule them, they see not getting vaccinated and not wearing a mask as owning the libs. It’s how they eviscerate us.
It’s not all or perhaps even mainly politics which define the tribes. As I said when I started, the minority, and I’m sure not Republican neighborhood I live in doesn’t have mask-wearing as the norm, but on the other side of Mosholu Parkway, closer to the hospital, the demographically similar neighborhood does. The way to get people to mask and vaccinate is to make it their perception to be that their people mask and vaccinate. That means having them perceive you as their people, part of us, not them. If you want people to vaccinate and wear a mask, let people know you’ve been vaccinated and wear a mask. Make it the social norm.
Wise Madness 