Yet, there is another side to this crisis. The pandemic offers us a rare opportunity to re-examine our beliefs and the choices we make around them. The situation offers us the opportunity to stretch and grow in ways that might otherwise take years of personal work.
There is nothing new about conspiracy theories. They have been with us for a very long time. Just since the 1960’s we’ve had The Red Menace, the Kennedy assassination, alien spacecraft, black helicopters, Area 51, the faked moon landing, chemtrails, pizzagate and recently the Jewish space laser and QAnon.
Franz Kafka, the great patron-martyr of self-criticism, captured the situation perfectly when he wrote: “There’s only one thing certain. That is one’s own inadequacy.”
How vulnerable are you to being criticized? No one likes being unfairly judged, but does it crumple you up inside like a ball of tin foil? Does it sit in your craw and eat at you for months, sometimes even years? And worst of all, is the brutal self-criticism we sometimes lay on ourselves!
There are calls seeking to reconcile the political split in the country. The goal is to use problem solving to ameliorate the conflict. Negotiation is almost always a good idea, with one enormous exception. To negotiate, the real issues must be on the table. And to this point in the discussion, they are not.