Hard and Soft

Two of my students practicing, 2021. Kodak Gold 200 film. During COVID, things got weird. A FedEx driver brought a check to my door, unmasked. Making conversation, I asked if they didn't make him wear one. "No reason to wear a mask for somethin' no worse than the flu." I let it go. What I wanted to say: the flu still kills tens of thousands of Americans a year, even with easy vaccination. Before we had a vaccine, it killed half a million of us. We're so cushioned by decades of medicine and public support that we think we can't be hurt. He was handling the public a hundred times a day, and there was zero chance I'd convince him otherwise. Society split into people-who-deliver-stuff and people-who-receive-stuff. Road rage went up. Murder went up 30% in a single year, the largest one-year jump the FBI has ever recorded. And I started keeping a gun in the car. At first, it felt like wearing a mask: a simple precaution, a statement of how I approached the world. Then it made my irritations…