Well, well, well, what do we have here?
Okay, who are you and what have you done with The New York Times?
All jokes aside, this is one of the saddest op-eds I've read from the NYT, so let's jump right in. This is written by former Obama speechwriter, David Litt, who's currently the head writer/producer for Funny or Die's Washington, DC, office. He begins the op-ed by talking about his brother-in-law and how different they are - Litt being a lib, and Matt Kappler being a Joe Rogan type.
He takes us back to the Covid days:
Then the pandemic hit, and our preferences began to feel like more than differences in taste. We were on opposite sides of a cultural civil war. The deepest divide was vaccination. I wasn't shocked when Matt didn't get the Covid shot. But I was baffled. Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation. It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I'd imagined we shared.
While it's still hilarious to this day to remember how liberals treated "anti-vaxxers" during the pandemic, it actually takes a lot of liberal guts to write this down like Litt is doing here. He moves on to the shunning of the unvaccinated.
My frostiness wasn't personal. It was strategic. Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?
I wasn't the only one thinking this. A 2021 essay for USA Today declared, 'It's time to start shunning the "vaccine hesitant."' An L.A. Times piece went further, arguing that to create 'teachable moments,' it may be necessary to mock some anti-vaxxers' deaths.
Shunning as a form of accountability goes back [millennia]. In ancient Athens, a citizen deemed a threat to state stability could be 'ostracized' — cast out of society for a decade. For much of history, banishment was considered so severe that it substituted for capital punishment. The whole point of Hester Prynne's scarlet letter was to show she had violated norms — and to discourage others from doing so.
Is he excusing the ostracization of the unvaccinated?
A little bit, but let's see where he goes with this one, cuz I think he - and many other liberals like him - are starting to "get it."
Few people who lost friends over the vaccine changed their minds. They just got new friends. Those exiled from one version of society were quickly welcomed by another — an alternate universe full of grievance peddlers and conspiracy theorists who thrived on stories of victimized conservatives.
There has been a sorting into belief camps, algorithmically and in real life. It dictates whom we match with on dating apps and where we live. We block those we disagree with online, we leave the group chat, we don't show up for Thanksgiving. Recent data suggests that today, one in five Americans is estranged from a family member over politics.
I wonder what percentage of this 1/5 are liberals. 😆
No one is required to spend time with people they don't care for. But those of us who feel an obligation to shun strategically need to ask: What has all this banishing accomplished? It's not just ineffective. It's counterproductive.
These days, ostracism might just hurt the ostracizer more than the ostracizee.
And now I suppose liberals can use that last line right there to play the victim for the rest of time: I shunned the unvaccinated and all I got was this lousy t-shirt and seven years of therapy. I need reparations!
Litt seems to play the victim in his conclusion, where he learns to surf on the Jersey shore and has to make friends with his conservative brother-in-law who he had shunned for all those years.
I assumed our surf-buddy experiment would either fail spectacularly or bring Matt over to my side. Neither of those things occurred. Instead, the connections we found were tiny and unrelated to politics. We agree that ‘Shrimply Irresistible' is the perfect so-bad-it's-good name for a seafood restaurant, and that Taylor Swift's 'Love Story' is a classic. Although I still wouldn't call myself a Rogan fan, we share an appreciation for his interview with the surf legend Kelly Slater. Matt and I remain very different, yet we've reached what is, in today's America, a radical conclusion: We don't always approve of each other's choices, but we like each other.
It helped that in the ocean, our places in the pecking order reversed. Matt's a very good surfer — one might call him ‘an elite' — and I am not. According to surfing's unwritten rules, he had the right to look down on me. But he never did. His generosity of spirit in the water made me rethink my own behavior on land.
It's almost like Litt is learning that you shouldn't look down on people just because of who they are.
A new concept if you're a modern liberal!
What's more, Litt wrote a whole book about this experience he had with his brother-in-law and surfing, entitled It's Only Drowning, A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground, so he must think about this a lot.
Good for him. And good for liberals if they follow Litt's lead.
And just so you know, liberals, we don't hold the Covid-shunning against you anymore. We'll never forget you did it, but we understand that you were being led by some of the worst people on the planet who were withholding boatloads of information from you, so it wasn't really your fault.
Come crawling back to us if you'd like, but don't expect us to change for you.
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