It's not about the argument.
2020-04-26 18:00:00Listen on Google Play
If you haven’t seen the interview between Anderson Cooper and Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, you probably have seen comments where people point out the complete lack of logic, contradictory statements, her obvious frustration with Anderson Cooper, and his frustration with her.
People have said some pretty harsh things, and knowing she’s advocating a policy that could literally kill hundreds and horribly sicken thousands, yes, we need to clearly understand why this is a bad idea. But take away all the words, all the details she provided. Take away all the lack of logic and all the just strange things she said.
In her mind, she’s not asking to put people in danger. She’s not disavowing science. She just wants things to back to how they were.
Think about that for a moment... She’s scared of the future. We’re all scared of the future. She remembers when things were different, and if we could just get back to that time, it would all be better.
It doesn’t matter that it’s impossible. It’s the touchstone of her, and many conservatives, irrational, emotional pleas. The world is not the world they remember, and there must be a way back. There just has to be.
These are the wounds of the kind of PTSD that we’re all struggling with. The loss isn’t just about Covid-19, but about how fast the world is changing, how we lose things every day, how new things are threatening and scary and destroy the things we know and hold dear.
If we could just go back to how things were before we were scared. You can see why she and the protesters fight so hard. They’re not angry, they’re scared and lost and don’t know how to get home again, because home doesn’t exist anymore, and maybe it never even did.