Focusing on how far we have come

Raphaelle and Eli will no longer be joining me on Activist Radio each week. Since our Vassar studio closed, it has been difficult to really make them part of the show. I am now doing the program from a home studio and each cohost had to call in to be recorded. This arrangement didn't replicate the feeling of doing the show together.

There were other problems as well. Raphaelle was headed back to South Africa for an extended stay, and Eli was down to one program a month. He had joined Activist Radio back in 2015 anticipating a six month commitment. He remained on the show for five years, and I have been very happy to have him as a cohost all this time.

COVID presented its own unique hurdles. Raphaelle and Eli are both Libertarians in spirit, and in many cases their agenda fit my leftist/socialist point of view. When the pandemic hit, however, we began to avoid issues like face masks, social distancing, contact tracing, and the efficacy of a potential vaccination. I was fine with that, but they eventually were not. 

Raphaelle wanted to do a segment last fall on our government's supposed plot to use face masks to curtail individual freedoms. More recently, Eli and I disagreed on a segment comparing the abuses of animal testing to the government's administering of the COVID vaccine.

My son is an emergency doctor in the Bronx, and I must admit that I am not receptive to these types of conspiracy theories. During a pandemic when people's lives are at stake, I don't feel that it is responsible to encourage non compliance with the recommendations of scientists and epidemiologists. Maybe during times like these, none of us behaves too rationally. In the Middle Ages, witch-hunts and pogroms accompanied the Black Death. Perhaps we should focus on how far we have come.