Thoughts on sharing a country with a cult

When I was in grad school, I spent several years as a teaching assistant for my PhD advisor's class. I remember well something that he liked to say to me and the other TAs about teaching.

If a handful of students did poorly on a particular assignment, those individual students could be blamed for their poor performances. But if a large number of students did poorly on an assignment, we shouldn't blame the individual students as much as we should blame ourselves.

I think there was a lot of wisdom in that. It was our responsibility to impart to the students the information they would need to complete the assignment successfully. If so many of the students were unable to succeed in the assignment, the instructors had failed. It wasn't just a failure of individual students, it was a systemic problem within the class, and therefore the responsibility of the people in charge of the class.

Right now in the United States of America, there is a simple assignment being given to people, an assignment with very clear right and wrong answers, and millions upon millions of people are failing that assignment.

Over the course of the COVID pandemic, people have had to make a lot of difficult decisions, decisions where the right and wrong answers haven't always been clear. I think a lot of liberal discourse on COVID has failed to acknowledge some of these complexities. That's not to say there haven't been a lot of people on the clearly wrong side of certain issues - but, for example, the "stay home and save lives" mantra, although well intentioned, can come across as awfully dismissive of people who, because of their jobs, never had the option to stay home. And there are a lot of other examples.

With the arrival of the vaccines, though? Now we have a decision that, if you are operating with the correct information, should be the opposite of difficult for the vast, vast majority of people. A decision where there is a very clear right answer (get the free, safe, and effective vaccine) and a very clear wrong answer (don't get the vaccine, thereby dramatically increasing your own chances of contracting COVID and developing severe illness, hampering efforts to get the pandemic under control, contributing to devastating strain on our health care systems and workers, harming local businesses that are struggling because of the pandemic, etc., etc., etc.).

Depressingly large numbers of people are continuing to go with the wrong answer. After getting off to one of the fastest starts thanks to our early access to large supplies of vaccine doses, something for which we are incredibly privileged, vaccination efforts in the US are stalling at levels well below those in most peer nations.

Now I want to be clear, the disinformation campaigns that are the focus of this post are not the only reasons for people not getting vaccinated. There are people who, for instance, haven't gotten vaccinated because they are worried about having heavy side effects (a real thing, I can say from my own experience) and not being able to take a sick day from work. There are people who are members of communities that have long histories that continue to the present day of being mistreated by the medical establishment, and therefore have valid reasons to distrust the medical establishment which translate into vaccine hesitancy - an understandable reason for questioning whether to get the shot, even if in this particular case it's not a good reason to not get the shot. There is a lot more that could have been done and could still be done to get past such reasons for hesitancy and increase vaccine uptake.

But there's vaccine hesitancy, and then there's outright vaccine refusal.

It's become very clear that the people most likely to fall into the latter category are people with right wing political leanings. And now we see not only people refusing to take a proven effective and safe vaccine, but also trying to fight the disease that the vaccine protects against with quack "cures" that have no evidence of efficacy and are much riskier in terms of side effects than the vaccine is!

It's bewildering. Why is this happening?

I can't help but think of my PhD advisor's words. When this many people are failing an assignment, the fault doesn't lie primarily with the individual people. The problem is with the information the people are receiving. But whereas in the example at the beginning of this post, the problem was that the instructors were trying but failing to clearly convey the correct information, here the problem is that the "instructors" are succeeding in conveying bad information.

Right wing media personalities and Republican politicians are pounding into the heads of their viewers, listeners, and followers false information about the vaccines. Many of those public figures are themselves vaccinated, but continue to spew out this vile propaganda because they think it will be to their political advantage. It's basically a crime against humanity.

I came across a nice analysis recently showing the vaccination levels and COVID rates in all counties of the United States grouped by 2020 Trump voting rate. Here's the graph of county vaccination rate by Trump voting rate:

(Note that the 0-10% and 90-100% group have relatively small sample sizes here.)

And here's the graph of rates of COVID death since the end of June 2021, which is a good cutoff point because it means that very nearly all of these deaths would have been prevented if everyone who was eligible had gotten vaccinated:

The images pretty much speak for themselves. In a real sense, people are killing themselves and their relatives and neighbors in order to prove their loyalty to a political movement. A political movement, it's important to note, the leader of which did get vaccinated but refused to make any effort to promote vaccination because if more people got vaccinated it could be politically beneficial to his enemies.

I imagine most everyone who is reading this post has gotten vaccinated. And you are probably, at least to some extent, part of a community in which people encourage getting vaccinated. If you had lived your whole life in an insular bubble in which extreme right wing views are promoted and other viewpoints are shunned, would you still submit the correct answer on the "should I get vaccinated?" assignment? Can you really say?

We all, every single one of us, firmly believe in some things that aren't true. It's a fact of life. Speaking for myself, I can't say what those things are, but I know that there are some. As I wrote about not long ago, we should all be more humble about the things we "think we know." For all of us, this is to some extent related to the sources from which we gather information, something that is not entirely in our control.

At the same time, some people believe more strongly in more wrong things than other people, and some wrong beliefs are much more harmful than others.

There is a big overlap between tendency to believe falsehoods about COVID vaccines and another set of false beliefs that are also doing tremendous harm to our society.

A recent poll found that a whopping 66 percent of Republicans believe, against all evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, with just 18 percent saying that President Biden is the rightful president. Such beliefs are, of course, being used as justification for attacks on our electoral system to try to enable Trump to steal the next election. The irony of the "rigged election" claims is that our electoral system is already effectively rigged in favor of Republicans thanks to gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and the makeup of the Senate (two senators per state regardless of population) all giving disproportionate power to rural white voters, thus enabling Republicans to control the government despite having far fewer people vote for them.

Again, when so many people are failing an assignment, we can't just blame the people as individuals; we have to blame the sources of information pertinent to the assignment. Again, Fox News, talk radio, Republican politicians, etc., are all spewing constant disinformation about our elections. This is not a new problem, but it's been getting worse and worse. At this point the Republican Party has essentially abandoned the concept of representative democracy. That isn't an exaggeration.

I have an older relative who I had always considered a really lovely person. The last few years have severely strained that perception. Recently I saw him post this on Facebook:

Let's not mince words. This (especially taken in context of other things my relative has posted) is some straight up fascist shit.

But that doesn't mean the things about my relative that made me like him for all those years aren't still there. Have a conversation about something not related to politics, and he still seems like the same person he always was. These aren't fundamentally evil people we're talking about. These are ordinary people who have had their minds warped by misinformation and as a consequence support evil things.

(This particular relative is vaccinated, by the way. But has also posted anti-vax stuff. Go figure. Cult behavior obviously doesn't have to make sense.)

I have several relatives who are like this, and I think it's hard for me to really blame them that much for the way they are. It makes me really sad. But propaganda is effective. 

It's kind of a weird balancing act for me. Recognizing that the people who are doing these things are not fundamentally horrible people, they're just very misguided, but simultaneously recognizing that by doing these things they're threatening the very foundations of our society and this has to be stopped in any way possible.

The people who I feel real animosity toward are the people who are creating and spreading the propaganda. The politicians and media figures who have filled people's heads with so much garbage that we now, literally, have people dying of a deadly virus to own the libs, and we have a still ongoing attempted insurrection trying to topple our form of elected government and replace it with white nationalist authoritarianism.

So that's the problem, as I see it. Millions upon millions of our fellow Americans have been so inundated with misinformation that they are constantly and horrifically failing the assignment of being a decent citizen of this country in multiple devastating ways. It's a cult. It really is. That's the problem.

What should we do about the problem? That's the hard part. I wish I knew. I'm largely at a loss. But I have a few thoughts, hopeless as it all sometimes seems.

People who are in a cult are never going to listen to someone trying to tell them that they're in a cult, with a possible exception if they have a close personal connection with the other person. Getting in arguments with hardcore Trump supporters and anti-vaxxers is not going to be effective.

People who do have close personal connections to cult members might sometimes be able to appeal to their better natures. Sometimes. I'd imagine the closer the connection, the more likely. And I'd imagine it also depends on how deeply someone is into the cult. But I'm definitely not an expert on the psychology of cult members so I'm not going to try to go into how to do this.

I think what's paramount in importance is the rest of us recognizing the threat and the urgency of acting to stop it.. Perhaps close to one-third of the people in this country are members of a cult that, if it gets its way, will destroy most of the things we love about this imperfect but still in so many ways amazing nation. But as depressingly large as the cult is, it's really not close to being a majority of the country. It can only succeed (with help, unfortunately, from the aforementioned biased-toward-rural-white-people electoral system) if enough of the non-cult-members keep their heads in the sand about what's going on.

We're all influenced by the information spheres we inhabit. And I think an important thing to realize about the information people in the United States receive is that, taken as a whole, the media today are incredibly biased in favor of Republicans.

"But, but, the liberal media..." you might be saying. Which if you had that reaction, is a good example of the pro-Republican bias.

We have, as I mentioned, right wing media outlets that have become just straight up propaganda factories. They aren't even attempting to accurately report what's going on. They're just trying to spin everything in whatever way is most favorable to the political right wing.

Then you have the rest of the mainstream media. They, for the most part, aren't trying to propagandize. They're trying to report the news. It's impossible to do this with no bias, and different sources have different biases. But the overriding bias of the mainstream, non-right-wing media is a bias toward trying to be unbiased - which manifests as a bias toward "both sides" reporting and "the truth is in the middle."

If you have two political parties, and both political parties are basically normal political parties that are both sincerely trying to engage with reality and the problems of the real world in different ways, then maybe this sort of "truth is in the middle" approach makes some sense. What we have instead is two political parties, and one of them is a basically normal political party, but the other one is an authoritarian white nationalist cult that is trying to overthrow democracy.

Thanks to all the "liberal media" accusations over the years, mainstream media outlets are terrified of being excessively friendly to Democrats and unfriendly to Republicans, so most of the time they try to be equally critical toward both parties. They portray disagreements between the two parties as normal partisan squabbling, just politics as usual. When one of the parties is an authoritarian white nationalist cult that is trying to overthrow democracy, and you treat this as all just politics as usual, you're doing a huge favor to the authoritarian white nationalist cult that is trying to overthrow democracy!

Most people don't really think about this. And I don't blame them; they have plenty of problems to worry about in their own day-to-day lives. But I think it's an important thing to recognize when considering why voters make the decisions they do.

As I mentioned, we all believe in things that aren't true. One such mistaken belief that I think is common for people who fall toward the middle of the political spectrum to hold is the belief that bipartisanship is, in and of itself, an important goal in the political process, rather than something that is sometimes a means toward achieving other worthy goals.

When the other party is actively trying to overthrow democracy, trying to work with that party is definitely not an important goal.

But people are set in their ways. So you have, for example, the situation in Maine where Joe Biden won the presidential vote but Republican Susan Collins was reelected to the Senate. A bunch of voters in Maine decided that although they didn't want the authoritarian white nationalist president to be reelected, they were cool with potentially giving the party led by an authoritarian white nationalist control of the Senate. That's not what their thought process was, of course, but that's the reality of their voting choices. And then you also have centrist Democrats in Congress who are putting President Biden's agenda in jeopardy and threatening to help the Republican plot to overthrow democracy, because they still seem to naively think that bipartisanship is a worthy goal.

Those are some of the obstacles we face.

We all have to think about what we can do to save American democracy. We have to engage the people around us, the people who aren't in the cult but also aren't as tuned in to politics, to make sure they aren't going to sit on the sidelines. We also have to be aware that a lot of people will just tune all this talk about fascism out. This is partly because people have an understandable need to just want to focus on their own issues, partly because of the impressions they get from the lazy "both sides" media, but regardless, those people have to be reached by other means. There should be reasons that just about any non cult member would not relish the chance of returning to the non-stop horror show of a Trumpist government. Find the reasons that are important to people around you and make sure they remember those reasons.

The election of 2020 was the most important of our lifetimes, but it unfortunately looks like every election for the foreseeable future could also be the most important of our lifetimes. What gives me hope? The Republican brand has been poisoned forever for a large majority of people my age and younger. Eventually, it's the people of these younger generations who will have the most say in our democracy.

If democracy survives that long.

So we have to do everything we can to make sure it does.

This is what the songs are for

I'm just going to gush about one of my current favorite musicians here for a bit. Is that okay? Because I would really like to do that.

I've been thinking about writing more about this artist for a while. After being extraordinarily blessed to have gotten to see them live the other day, I went from "thinking about" to "feeling compelled toward." More on that show in a bit, but first...

The album

It's a very exciting thing to me when I have the realization, after listening more and more to a newly obtained album that I really like, that said album is in fact becoming one of my favorites of all time. This has happened this year with Ignorance by The Weather Station.

It seems that every eight years now, an album enters my life that has lyrics that just really speak to my soul in a profound way. This is something I realized recently. It's one of those weird things that I notice because I have a weirdly heightened tendency to notice patterns. I'm really weird. Whatever, I enjoy it. Anyway, I was thinking about it, after thinking about how much I love the lyrics of Ignorance and pondering what other albums had lyrics that I had loved that much, and there are two other albums that were on that level.

In 2005 (not this album's release year, but the year I started listening), it was Ozma's Rock and Roll Part Three. Its lyrics spoke to me because I was a really shy, nerdy young adult who was into things like video games, Star Wars (there's a song about having a crush on Natalie Portman!) and punny wordplay ("an apple pie, the number pi, I studied you in math class" from the song "Apple Trees"? Classic!). Also, the lyrics lean heavily on nostalgia, something that speaks to me even more today, even as I've to some extent outgrown certain other aspects.

In 2013, eight years later, the album was Typhoon's White Lighter. Its lyrics, heavily influenced by the lead singer's near-death experience from Lyme disease and consequent pondering of mortality, spoke to me because I got into the band shortly after my wife was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. The album was in fact released the same week she was admitted to the hospital.

In 2021, another eight years on, it's Ignorance. (What will be the album of 2029, I wonder?) And as for why this album's lyrics speak to me so much? I'd say they speak to me because, well, I'm a human being living in this strange and distressing era of history.

There are reasons why the lyrics speak to me personally more than they might to the average person, but in comparison to the other two albums I cited, I think the appeal and the relatability are broader, because it's not about a specific aspect of my life, it's about human (and non-human!) life in general. Given that, I've decided that if I had to pick one album that I would subjectively assess as having "the best lyrics" of any album I know, this is the one.

The music is great too. Tamara Lindeman has really evolved the sound of her music from the folk stylings of her early records, which were quite good too, but this is even better. The jazzy indie rock on Ignorance has this consistently propulsive feel from the rhythm section and piano that just lends this sense of urgency that goes so well with the subject matter of the lyrics. And Lindeman has a wonderfully expressive voice. It all comes together in a great package, but to me the lyrics are just next level so I want to talk about why I love the lyrics so much.

I'm going to go through the songs of the album in order and pick out a favorite line or two and explain why they're favorites. I hope this post can properly convey the brilliance contained on this album. I think these lyrics are by far best experienced reading along with the liner notes while listening to the album front to back. But I want to talk about it, so, here goes.

1. Robber

"You never believed in the robber.  You thought a robber must hate you to wanna take from you.  The robber don’t hate you, you never believed in the robber but the robber never believed in you."

Okay, this song is about how the heartless capitalistic system we live in robs us all of so much (uh oh, we're getting political here!). And I think this bit expresses so nicely and succinctly how people don't even think about how so much harm is done by just a system, a mindless thing, that has no intent, good or bad, it's just the way things are. It doesn't have to be the way things are. But most people don't question it.

2. Atlantic

"My god, I thought, my god, what a sunset; blood red floods the Atlantic. With a wine in my hand, laid back in the grass of some stranger’s field, while shearwaters reeled overhead, thinking; I should get all this dying off my mind, I should really know better than to read the headlines, does it matter if I see? Or really, can I not just cover my eyes?"

Just incredibly evocative imagery, which Lindeman excels at, to open this song. And then the lines about all the dying in the headlines that the first time I heard I just thought, wow, this pretty much sums up how it feels to be in the world right now. (The album was released in early February of this year, when COVID deaths in the US and many other countries had just recently reached their very peak. Not that this song is specifically about COVID - I would read it as more about the ongoing and worsening climate catastrophes that heavily inform Lindeman's songwriting.)

3. Tried to Tell You

"But some days there might be nothing you encounter, to stand behind the fragile idea that anything matters."

Don't we all feel this way sometimes? The idea that "anything matters" can be a fragile idea, but it's important to remind ourselves of the things we encounter that do reinforce this idea. Also, this is the song from which the line "This is what the songs are for" that I used to title this post came from, and for me, great songs, such as those on this album, are some of the most important things to help me feel there are things that matter.

4. Parking Lot

"Waiting outside the club in a parking lot, I watched some bird fly up and land on the rooftop, then up again into the sky, in and out of sight, flying down again to land on the pavement.  It felt intimate to watch it; its small chest rising and falling, as it sang the same song, over and over again, over the traffic and the noise.  Is it alright if I don’t wanna sing tonight?  I know you are tired of seeing tears in my eyes.  But are there not good reasons to cry?"

The image of the bird, and the description of how it feels intimate to watch it - so, so good. And then the connection from the bird to how the observer - the human singer - is feeling. I'm honestly envious of Lindeman's way with words. Also from this song:

"But everywhere we go there is an outside, over all of these ceilings hangs a sky."

Something about this line blows me away in a way that's hard to articulate. But it just really makes me think about our place in the world.

Okay, and I have to mention one other line from this truly incredible song:

"I confess I don’t wanna undress this feeling, I am not poet enough to express this peeling."

I disagree with this statement. I would contend that Tamara Lindeman absolutely is "poet enough."

5. Loss

"You lay in bed, the sun streamed through the blinds.  Sweat soaked through your shirt.  You lay a hand across your eyes, every other part of you hurt.  From inside the confines of the story that everything would be alright, it was only so wide you could open your eyes, you could only let in so much light.  But you knew the story had never been true - loss is loss, is loss, is loss."

I think anyone who has experienced great personal loss can relate to the idea of the "story that everything would be alright" - the story that "had never been true." And again, the imagery here stuns me.

6. Separated

A few months ago, I wrote a whole post that was largely inspired by lyrics from this song. Here's another good excerpt:

"You try again your arguments out on me, I try and tell you again; but if you wanted to understand me you could, if you wanted to hold my hand you would, but you don’t want to, you’ve committed to this wall we sleep against."

I think this is such a great description of two people in a relationship that is no longer working.

7. Wear the World

"It does not matter to the world if I embody it.  It could not matter less that I wanted to be a part of it."

A very poetically stated reflection on our ultimate significance, or lack thereof.

8. Trust

"In the throes of this divorce, in this court proceedings; for some reason my mind was filled with all my softest feelings."

To me this is about how when a relationship has stopped working and it's ending or ended, at times you can still have very sentimental feelings about that person and the relationship, which I'm sure is a familiar concept but one that people often don't seem to talk about.

9. Heart

Okay, I love the lyrics of this song so much (I'd say this and "Parking Lot" are my top favorites of the album), I'm going to go through them all.

"I don’t have the heart to conceal my love, when I know it is the best of me.  If I should offend you, I will show myself out, you can bury me in doubt if you need to."

Being in love, and not knowing if the other person feels the same way, and not being able to keep it inside any longer. Or it can also work if this is about, rather than love for another person, love for the world - being passionate about important things, and the way some people recoil at this passion. I think it works on both levels.

"I can walk out in the street, no-one need look at me, it is with my eyes I see.  I guess that I am soft, but I am also angry, but I will feel all my loss, I will hold my heart inside me."

The idea of being soft but also angry is so striking and so relevant at this moment in time. I also like the "loss" callback.

"My dumb eyes turn toward beauty; turn towards sky, renewing.  My dumb touch is always reaching; for green for soft for yielding."

This, to me, hearkens back to earlier songs on the album like "Atlantic" and "Parking Lot." There's this deep appreciation for the beauty of the world we inhabit. And there's doubt over whether it's worth caring so much with all the ongoing tragedy. In a way I think this song brings all the themes of the album together. I guess you could say it's the "Heart" of the album. Heh. (Still like corny wordplay!) Sorry, moving on...

"In the pale dim light, I am always reeling, through long midnights of feeling."

This is a staggeringly poignant and poetic description of an experience that is no doubt familiar to many.

 "Of all the many things that you may ask of me, don’t ask me for indifference, don’t come to me for distance."

An excellent statement of the importance of caring - which again, could be about a specific other person, or about the world as a whole.

"No, I don’t have the heart to conceal my love, if it is too hard to look at me, I will show myself out, walk out in the city.  You can bury me in doubt if you feel it necessary."

And returning to the opening lines, restated but slightly altered with a different final rhyme which I like because I guess it just sounds more interesting that way!

10. Subdivisions

"Got in the car, and the cold metallic scent of snow caught in my throat as I reached out to turn on the radio; the unfamiliar songs, the voices sing of love, and of wanting to dance and to sing in the rhythm of.  The road was overwhelmed with snow piled high in all the ditches, I drove as though I did not understand all the divisions, the yellow signs and the painted lines, and the order they envisioned was so clear.  I joined the steady line of cars on the highway, as though I was going home, but I drove the wrong way.  Past the looming walls of subdivisions, out past the strip malls, white fields and gray gas stations."

There is even more incredibly vivid imagery here. Again, I'm envious. And the divisions/subdivisions thing, without even really saying it, I think so much is being said here about the way that modern society has been structured and how it divides us and all the harm it causes. I'll spare you the rant about car culture that I could easily go on here.

And that's not even close to all that the song is about. It dips back to the personal relationship themes from earlier in the album: "I left you back at home because I simply could not do it, tell you I could be with you when I could see right through it; our whole life.  But what if I misjudged; in the wildest of emotion, I took this way too far?" (I enjoy the "took this way too far" double meaning here.) So the album is simultaneously about struggling with one's place in a relationship and struggling with one's place in a world that is being devastated by humanity's callous actions. And speaks beautifully on both themes.

So that's it. Check out Ignorance. I implore you!

Next up...

The show

I caught The Weather Station live at the Magic Bag in Ferndale, Michigan (a Detroit suburb) on Thursday, September 9. I made the drive up from Cleveland late in the afternoon, grabbed some dinner (takeout I'd ordered ahead of time), and headed over to the venue.

It struck me as I was waiting outside that it was really nice just to be doing this. To have driven to another city for the purpose of seeing a band I really love. That's something I do all the time, normally, because music is such a huge part of my life, but it had been almost two years since the last time I'd made such a trip.

It was not the first show I've attended this year (there were some others earlier this summer in Cleveland), but it was the first at which I had to show my vaccine card to get in. I'm very glad that venues have enacted this requirement. Additionally, at the request of the artist, attendees were required to be masked at all times except when actively eating or drinking. I support this as well, due to the current situation with the delta variant - in fact I recently bought a pack of KN95 masks specifically for wearing at shows - but going into it I thought it might feel a little weird to be wearing a mask at a show.

It turned out, which I had not thought much about ahead of time, that having a show with both vaccine and mask requirements for attendees seemed to select for an audience of people who all really wanted to be there to experience the music. The crowd wasn't huge, but it was one of the best audiences I've ever shared a concert experience with, because everyone had their full attention on what was happening on stage, and there was none of the annoying audience chatter that often irritates me at shows.

If requiring masks at shows leads to people in the audience not talking during the performances, then I say let's have masks at shows forever! (I mean, I don't think this will really happen, but if it actually does cut down on audience chatter I would genuinely be glad of the change.)

I didn't realize it ahead of time, but this was the first club show The Weather Station had played since before COVID, as well as the first time since before COVID that the Canadian band had crossed the border. I felt very lucky to be there for such an occasion.

It was truly a magical experience, something that I've missed so much in this last year and a half. The band played almost all the songs from Ignorance as well as a few older cuts, including standout track "Thirty" from 2017's self-titled album. The band's keyboard player was not present due to a border crossing snafu, so Lindeman took on extra keyboard duties while singing, which she handled well. All the band members' performances were on point - guitar, bass, drums, and nice clarinet and saxophone flourishes from the wind musician adding some great texture to the songs.

It was easy to tell that it was a really emotional occasion for everyone, the people on stage and the people in the audience. We've all missed this. Going a year with almost no person live music has made me realize that I really do think live music is a nigh essential part of the experience of being human. Sure, that's more true for me than for the average person, but I think it applies broadly.

After a great main set, Lindeman returned to the stage alone to begin the encore, sat at the keyboard, and played a beautiful song I'd never heard before but hope to hear again. It contained a lot of her usual evocative imagery as she described looking at the stars in the night sky as a child and then connected that to looking at the night sky as an adult and seeing fireworks on New Year's Eve as the year 2020 approached.

2020, man. Wow.

This was followed by a full band performance of "Subdivisions," a fitting closer. After the band left the stage a second time, the audience applauded enthusiastically, and some of us, me included, just kept clapping. I think we just really didn't want it to be over. In a way that is often true when you see a really excellent show, but now even more so than usual. I don't know whether Lindeman was anticipating doing a second encore, but she came out again, and treated us to a performance of "Traveler" from 2011 album All of It Was Mine. I've listened to that album many times, but I had never truly listened to the lyrics of that song in a way that their meaning sunk in the way all the lyrics of Ignorance have. And I found myself sitting there just stunned once more at the beautiful and emotional pictures Lindeman paints with her songs.

Most of the way through the song, though, at an instrumental part, she stopped playing and said one of the strings of her guitar was out of tune and she had to tune it. So then, while tuning, she kept talking to the audience, and kind of started rambling. And then laughed and said that before going out on tour again after all this time, she had thought about how she wanted to present herself on stage, and had decided she wanted to go out and just be serious and play the songs and not spend much time on banter. And here she was at the first show out on tour and already getting away from doing that.

I, for one, really enjoy hearing the interesting things musicians talk about on stage, so I welcomed this.

Eventually she said that the end of the song was sad and after getting sidetracked on amusing banter she couldn't get back into that place so she wasn't going to finish the song. Instead she'd play a different song that was more upbeat. She started playing the song, got about one line in, then stopped and confessed she had forgotten the words to the song and broke down laughing.

That was the end of the show! Lindeman said she owed us one and promised that they'd be back, thanked the audience again, and left the stage. It was a very unusual ending but I have no complaints at all. It was such a, well, human moment. A moment of that special connection that happens between a musician and their audience. When musicians get in a room with people who really love their music, magic happens, magic that can't truly be replicated in any other way. It happened throughout that evening at the Magic Bag.

There was just so much joy in that room! I had almost forgotten what it felt like.

There was another thing that Lindeman said during the show that really struck me, in a sad way. She said that it was good to be back in America. She noted that the news from here is "intense" (no kidding!), but whenever she actually comes here, it's really nice. It's a nice place, she said, "and it always will be."

The way she said "and it always will be"... it was one of those things where you say something and the words you use express certainty, but you don't actually feel certain, you actually are just hoping that it will be true.

These really are scary times. And as I drove home, I was thinking about how, when I was a kid, I was told all this stuff about the USA being the greatest country in the world, and a lot of it was BS, but I do think that back then, it was at least generally the case that this country was admired by people in other countries. Nowadays, people in other countries feel bad for us. And for very good reasons! I've been aware of this before, but Lindeman's words really drove it home for me. And it did make me feel sad.

To quote a favorite tweet from Julien Baker (who I'm very much looking forward to seeing live in a couple weeks), though, "at least there's music am i right." The Weather Station's show on Thursday was the best reminder of that that I've had since my trip to California to see Ozma in December 2019. And it was all the more poignant now, in a way I never could have imagined back then. This truly is "what the songs are for."

That wraps up what I have to say about The Weather Station, but I also have some thoughts about...

Going to concerts during COVID

This was not the first show I've been to this year, but it was the first show I've been to since the delta surge in the US got bad (although it's currently not that bad in Michigan, at least). There was a part of me, and I know this stems to some part just from me being a generally anxious person, that was worrying, am I doing something wrong by going to a concert now?

I know that, rationally, when you look at the way most people are living their lives at this stage of the pandemic (see, for example, crowded indoor restaurants at which people are talking and eating and obviously not wearing masks while doing so), the relative added risk of COVID spread from a concert at which both vaccines and masks are required is tiny. (Especially a concert that was not crowded, as was the case here.) I know that musicians and venues have been put in a horrible place by this pandemic, and additional economic assistance from the government is not coming, and I think that if these events can happen in a way that does a good job minimizing risk, it's a good thing to support those musicians and venues. I also think that having events with vaccine requirements will likely help increase vaccination rates, even if by a small amount, in a way that not having events at all, or having events without vaccine requirements, would not do, and therefore could very well be a net positive in the fight to end the pandemic.

Still, it was hard to shake the feeling, what if it was wrong to do this? I've seen some people on Twitter say things like, "There shouldn't be concerts right now!" Which gets to my anxious brain.

It got me thinking about how people have talked about COVID risk in general, and I realized even more something that I had already been realizing. I think that the way a lot of liberals (myself included, when I think back to earlier in the pandemic), have talked about COVID risk has been very sanctimonious, and has come across (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not), as basically trying to paint people as morally wrong for simply having normal human wants and needs.

I realized how essential a part of life live music is to me. And I'm sure to a lot of other people. Now, I'm fairly introverted, and although I definitely missed getting to spend time with my family, to be honest I could just as well do without social gatherings of more than, say, five or six people. (With the exception of concerts! Which are a different sort of social gathering, I suppose.) So other than the lack of concerts, the restrictions on gatherings of large groups of people weren't so much a problem for me. But I'm sure there are other people who find going to parties just as essential a part of life as I find going to concerts.

Now, look, I totally do think that the restrictions on indoor gatherings were well justified prior to vaccines being widely available. (Now, I think vaccine requirements are a better option.) But I also think it's pretty messed up that people have been shamed so much for just wanting to do things that humans, as social animals, have a natural want and need to do.

I remember seeing someone tweet something that was like, "If people had just done the little things like get vaccinated, wear a mask, and social distance, we wouldn't be in this mess." (I think an emerging theme here is that I spend too much time on Twitter...)

And yeah, getting vaccinated, that absolutely should be a little thing for the vast, vast majority of eligible people. It's a huge problem that a lot of those people aren't getting vaccinated, which is a topic for another post. Wearing masks? Yeah, not that big a thing generally speaking. But at the same time, it's pretty privileged for someone who is working from home and only has to wear a mask at the grocery store to say that about people who are toiling in hot kitchens all day.

But social distancing? Calling social distancing a "little thing" when this has been going on for a year and a half, to me, just betrays a fundamental misunderstanding and/or denial of human nature.

(I'm sure the counterargument would be that if everyone had just done what they were supposed to, it would have all ended a long time ago, but when you look at what has happened in numerous other countries around the world, I just don't think it's realistic that that could have ever happened in the US. Especially with the emergence of the delta variant. Yes, things did not have to be nearly as bad as they have been, but it wasn't going to just go away in any realistic scenario.)

Now, I find it very understandable why people have talked about COVID risk in this way. It's been a horrible time that has been hard on everyone in different ways. I'm not trying to shame people for shaming people, which would be hypocritical. I just don't think it's been productive.

I wonder how much difference it could have made if the moralizing about COVID could have been avoided and instead there had just been a focus on giving accurate information on what the risks were and what were the best ways to mitigate those risks. Of course, the bigger problem all along was all the misinformation and politicization of the pandemic coming from those on the right politically, but I think those of us on the left could have done a lot better too.

Ultimately, I think all the moralizing likely led people to react in one of three general ways. First, there are those people who were never going to take this seriously. Nothing could have ever reached them, but I think the moralizing might have made them even more eager to flout restrictions, "to trigger the libs."

Then there are the people who did want to take it seriously, but I think those people fall on a spectrum of risk tolerance. Many of those who fall more toward the "want to live as close to normal life as possible while mitigating risks" side would be likely to eventually get annoyed by the moralizing and then start tuning out all the rules and restrictions. Those who fall more toward the "want to avoid risk as much as possible" side have probably gotten complexes where we now experience unhealthy levels of stress and anxiety about doing even low risk activities. And none of this is helpful to the overall health of individual people or of society.

That was pretty rambling, but I think there's a point in there somewhere.

Anyway, major kudos to artists and venues for requiring vaccines and masks for concerts (although I still think we need more attention to ventilation and filtration of indoor air!). Please, let's all make sure everyone around us is getting vaccinated so we can all go back to enjoying in person live music and all the other things that are essential for us to fully live our lives as the social animals we are.