This is about a column I never wrote.
It was three years ago, before any of us knew what COVID-19 was. Before lockdowns. Before mask mandates. Before the prolific videos on social media about angry people accosting teenagers at retail stores or restaurants for being asked to wear a mask or social distance. Before hospital systems, schools and governments started talking seriously about requiring their employees to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
A nurse who worked at a Mercy Hospital location in south ºüÀêÊÓƵ County had been fired because she wouldn’t get a flu shot, as required by the hospital of its critical health care employees. There had been a small protest and some news coverage. The woman’s family asked me if I would interview her, and I agreed.
In concept, the story struck me as one of a balance of freedoms. In college, I studied English philosopher John Locke, whose views on the social contract had a heavy influence on America’s Founding Fathers. Locke believed that to preserve freedom, some level of government was necessary because at some point, one person’s freedom tramples upon another’s. There must be a balance.
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Mercy is a Catholic hospital and seeks the religious freedom to operate as one. The woman claimed a religious exemption to not get a vaccine. She told me she wasn’t an anti-vaxxer, but a friend of hers, who was there for the interview, clearly was. He took me down the rabbit hole of anti-vaxx theories on the internet.
I called Mercy executives and got their side of the story. They believed that to protect the freedoms and safety of their other employees, and their patients, all employees who had regular contact with patients had to have a flu shot.
I never wrote the column. There was an undercurrent of anti-vaxxer philosophy that was finding new life in the age of Trump, and I didn’t want to feed it, even unintentionally.
Three years later, my worst fears were on display this week at the ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Council meeting. Despite a new mask mandate having been issued in both the city of ºüÀêÊÓƵ and ºüÀêÊÓƵ County, an angry group of mostly maskless Trumpists crowded the council chambers Tuesday night and booed and chanted and carried on in protest of the mandate issued by County Executive Sam Page. The political spectacle was a clear sign: Our social contract is broken.
On the same day, several police officers who survived the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol testified in harrowing and emotional detail in front of a U.S. House committee about the politically fueled violence of that day.
“There was an attack on Jan. 6, and a hit man sent them,†said Officer Harry Dunn of the Capitol Police. Dunn, a Black man, told of being called the N-word over and over again, the first time that had happened to him while wearing his police uniform. “I want you to get to the bottom of that,†he urged the bipartisan panel investigating the attack on the nation’s foundation of democracy.
From ºüÀêÊÓƵ to Washington, the social contract is broken. Over racism. Over vaccination. Over politics. Over the simple act of donning a mask for a period of time while indoors to protect our fellow neighbors from a killer that we can’t see.
It’s impossible to separate politics — or former President Donald Trump — from any of this. Republicans are famous for standing up for police officers and tweeting out hashtags such as #backtheblue, but with the exception of Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, none of them wanted any part of listening to the testimony of the police officers on Tuesday or getting to the bottom of the insurrection.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican, sued Page and Mayor Tishaura Jones, both Democrats, over their mask mandates but has said nothing about the one in Cole County, where he works, issued by a Republican judge at his courthouse.
There, where I covered a trial this week, residents donned their masks every day, as required by Circuit Court Judge Jon Beetem. There were no protests or disruptions. Everybody seemed to accept the social contract, perhaps because no politicians were pandering or rabble-rousing.
I don’t know how we come back from our current schism. Perhaps some words from Locke will help guide us: “To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.â€
In my faith tradition, that’s called the Golden Rule. Some day soon, it would be nice to write a column about how that simple concept, applied in small doses in courthouses and schools and grocery stores and grand government chambers, helps bring us back from the depths of our current division.