Posted on by Californiacontrarian

A Continued Covid Dichotomy

From the beginning of this Covid pandemic I have been perplexed by the vast differences in individual’s behavior. Some were avoiding contact with any and everybody to the extent of having loved ones drop off food without risking any contact – even verbal contact through a closed door, while others were out shopping at grocery stores, Costco, and Target. 

A dichotomy.

Siblings in the same family (with basically the same genetic pool) not infrequently responded very differently. For example, one sibling would not permit having any contact with the second sibling because the second sibling’s kids were attending preschool. The second sibling basically said that kids were essentially not being affected, and it was important for her kids to have social contact with other kids so as the kids could live as normal a life as possible. 

A dichotomy within the same family.

Whereas some were wearing masks outside while walking alone or while driving alone in a car, others felt that the masks were minimally effective at best in  just about all settings. 

Certainly there were valid reasons for some to react or perhaps over-react, as they were in a significantly higher risk profile group, or they lived with grandma. However, it was perplexing to explain why a thirty-year old thin and otherwise healthy individual would be going to extraordinary lengths to avoid anything that could possibly be a possible exposure risk.

Etcetera, etcetera. Dichotomy upon dichotomy.

Perhaps  best summed up as a “sine qua non” philosophy vs a “que sera, que sera” philosophy.(Don’t you just love it when I toss around foreign language words!)

But why?

Perhaps a partial to this question was a recent Gallup survey.

From the New York Post:

A whopping 71 percent of Democrats in the United States want healthy people to stay home “as much as possible,” even as vaccinations soar and new coronavirus infections have plummeted, according to a new survey from Gallup.

In contrast, 87 percent of Republicans surveyed and 64 percent of independents said it was time for people to start living normally after more than a year of pandemic shutdowns and working from home.

This partisan divide continued for questions about how quickly respondents had jumped back into their normal routines.

As of May 2021, 57 percent of Democrats said their lives had fully or somewhat returned to how it had been before the pandemic. That number was 77 percent for Republicans and 68 percent for independents.

Interesting. Still a perplexing dichotomy.

Personally I think that most Democrats are wired differently from most Republicans, and it is their wiring that causes to which political affiliation they ascribe. In this Gallup survey situation the fact that the Democrats are still uber Covid cautious, whereas the Republicans aren’t, is to me  probably explained by intrinsic differences in the wiring of their respective brains.

In a practical sense these intrinsic wiring differences and their  consequent individual approaches to things are not arguable and not amenable to persuasion. In day-to-day life if you are a logic-based-thinking Republican, do not waste your time trying to convince an emotion-based-thinking Democrat that it is okay to shed his/her mask, and go to Costco or the beach.

6/17/21

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