Close Encounters with the Mirror World, Part 1

January 11, 2024

Jan 11, 2024

The photograph

Through intercessions of grace I have been spared much of the surreality of the pandemic. By the time it descended in 2020, I was already exhausted by trying to minimize the effects on my life from chronic conditions and feeling blistered by modernity as I tried to become a stable adult. As much as the mounting tragedy of this mass-disabling event (which, I should note here, is still ongoing) has put me on edge, I find I am mostly well-suited to accept its realities. In the early days, I made mention to others that I’d already been living like the world would make me sick for a couple of years. During the quarantine era I even delighted in the realization that humanity was being made to sit down and stop running from its feelings, as I had been made to do so many times in my young life.

Distressingly, the handling of the virus has been bungled on both a social and public health level. Our indifference to the nature by which it spreads and its long-term effects have relegated it to almost taboo status. We are currently, according to CDC data, experiencing the second-largest Covid spike nationally, in a period where vaccines are no longer made freely available without health insurance, and the prevailing attitude is very much “treat it like the flu.” This comes despite the devastating toll the flu took on the worldwide population back in our less technologically-saturated era. None of this arrives as a surprise, at least not to me and my circle of radical friends, most of whom are well acquainted with illness and its lack of a place in public life.

So it was sharp, and fascinating, when two Covid-related flashes of disorientation decided to flare in the final 36 hours of 2023—three years and what has felt like several lifetimes into this mess. The first was when I woke up to a text from my dad, on the last day of 2023, at 7:15 pm (I work the night shift), with a picture of a positive Covid test. “Uh oh,” it read. Somehow, my father had thus far gone the whole length of the pandemic without so much as a misplaced sniffle, for which I—and surely he—had been grateful, especially amidst a number of other misfortunes that fell like frozen rain into his lap the past few years. But the jig was up; I don’t know if I had just expected this would never happen, nor can I explain why it seemed so strange to me that it bestowed an even denser reality to what I know has been a precarious situation for some time.

The other strange moment occurred the next morning at a Planet Fitness, as I ran on the treadmill, waiting for my partner to finish in the massage chair room. I had been half-heartedly listening to the hosts of the podcast Conspirituality (more on them in a bit). They were riffing on Gwyneth Paltrow’s tone-deaf campaign to brand disability with the arrival of her long Covid diagnosis when my eyes rested on one of the many television screens towards which the cardio equipment faces. Looking at the logo in the corner, I realized it was tuned to Fox News, a media purveyor to which I have no exposure to in my life beyond the gym. A voyeuristic curiosity set alight within me and, moments later, a guest was on the screen to talk about the unsealing of court documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. This was when my second bout of surreality hit—because for much of the past week, I’d been staring at a photo of that guest, in which I am pictured to the left of him.

A little over a week ago, I was standing with one of my extremely dear friends (who I’ll call “A” here) in a dance hall elaborately decorated for the solstice. Our conversation, as it often does, circled the drain that is the political landscape: “A” had just gotten back from a week in Idaho with their grandparents, with whom they’d watched Doris Day movies, toured Christmas lights displays, and shot their first gun. “A” is trans and the relationship is, for the most part, an example of how love for another can bridge generational and ideological differences. It is also a painful, fascinating reminder of how love can also fail to bridge these gaps—all three have effectively cut ties with A’s parents, who struggle with mental health issues and have extricated themselves (and A’s many siblings) off from most of the wider world out of religious zealotry. Recently, the grandparents left their home in western WA for the Boise area, which “A” tells me is the fastest-growing urban area in the country. Our conversation turned to the 2024 election and rapidly grew more despondent. As we were sinking, I got a mischievous glint in my eye. I recorded a voice message asking for a favor, and sent it to my dad. Mere minutes later, he responds with an image I haven’t probably laid eyes on for a decade.

There is a spectrum, I think, when it comes to modern right-leaning people in America. It begins at relatively centrist, and perhaps ends at Marjorie Taylor Greene. What I have found is that people can be on this spectrum and cross-pollinate with other points on it in their beliefs, but it is their actions (relational, civic) that truly locate them along the continuum. Somewhere in there is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., independent candidate for president, son of late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and if we are to believe the title bequeathed him as one of the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s “Disinformation Dozen,” an “influencer”; one who spread the “vast majority of Covid-19 anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories” in a 2021 report.

Where he actually resides on the spectrum is confusing, although my partner recently pointed out that while his attitude toward the environment has always been liberal, his other views have leaned conservative. It’s the former element to his public persona—his environmental advocacy—that landed me at an event with my dad, watching RFK Jr. speak when I was 17, back in the Obama era. I somehow ended up in the crossfire of my dad’s camera with “Bobby" that evening, and my countenance in the photo is of someone who does not quite know how they got into the situation and is really not sure they want to be there.

When I opened the file on my phone last week, it was just as my partner’s friend had begun playing beautiful, haunting harp music at the front of the room. In between songs, she told us how she was inspired by her mother’s death to take up the instrument, and dedicated the performance to her. Amidst this moving act of art, “A”and I stood near the back of the room, holding our hands over our masked mouths, trying desperately to suppress our giggles as we stared at the screen. Mostly it was because both myself and Bobby look absolutely nuts, but it was also the glib irony of what he represented then versus now.

The Spokane Riverkeeper is a beloved and effective group dedicated to the protection and conservation of the Spokane’s watershed. It is part of the Waterkeeper Alliance, an international nonprofit conglomerate that unites those committed to protecting waters in their local communities. It was while doing court-mandated community service with the Hudson Riverkeepers in the 80’s that Kennedy began his involvement with environmental justice, effectively reshaping the grassroots group into the force it is today, and which by 2000 had been fastidiously integrated into his personal brand. It is true that the presence of these connected, organized water protection groups was a direct result of Kennedy’s work over three decades. Although reports of his courtroom demeanor as the org’s lead attorney paint the portrait of a bullish litigator (at times to the detriment of his own ideals) I would argue that at least in the early to mid aughts, he was one of the more effective public figures raising the alarm on environmental issues—and particularly, conservation of watersheds. This is how I ended up in a ballroom with him, when he came to speak in support of the newly-formed Riverkeeper, all the way back in 2011.

RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccination stance, which began as a niche crusade in 2005, is rooted in medical traumas he experienced with his extremely peanut-allergic son during the child’s first three years of life. It has since become a defining feature of his national persona and a signature crusade that drew bitter critiques amidst the public health communities’ push for vaccinations as Covid infections soared. His siblings have publicly rebuked him, and denounced his recently—announced presidential candidacy as “dangerous” for the nation.

In the current climate of misinformation that RFK Jr. has in no small way fostered, their fears are sound. In June 2019, RFK Jr. embarked upon a trip to the island nation of Samoa where he was received as a dignitary and welcomed by government officials and anti-vax activists. Later that year a measles outbreak—attributed to a sharp decline in vaccination rates—killed 83 Samoans.

The anti-vax movement is not one I feel compelled to address at length. I think the science behind the Covid vaccine is marvelously innovative and speaks for itself in terms of its efficacy and relatively limited risk. That some are unable to accept this, and limit themselves to a worldview colored by grievance towards big Pharma and the government, is a natural consequence of our complex, oft-predatory net of systems.

While outspoken vaccine resistance may assuage those trying to keep said entities out of their business, it also very much puts them in the rest of ours. Public health concerns aside, the most unsettling aspect of the anti-vax world is the casual cruelty that it rains on members of the autistic community and the people who love them.

Autism Spectrum Disorder—a condition that manifests uniquely in each person, and which we are currently having a cultural coming-to-grips with as many adults receive a later-in-life diagnosis—is unknown in origin but likely a product of genetic and environmental influence in early life. Thoroughly debunked misinformation associating vaccination with autism began circulating on the internet’s early days when a faulty paper linked the condition with the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine. The author of that paper lost his medical license and was found to have financial interests in the discrediting of the MMR vaccine, interests that likely fueled his manipulation of the data. By the time this came to light, the media had already fanned a firestorm around the discredited paper, and it continued to stay in the public’s attention due to one key factor: it played into the visceral fear many parents have regarding their children’s development.

Naomi Klein, speaking at an event in Seattle, 2015 (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Naomi Klein, herself the parent of a child with ASD, expertly examines the layers of parental anti-autistic sentiment in my pick for 2023’s Book of the Year, Doppelgänger (which my sister-in-arms Taylor Rose is currently reviewing on her own Substack.) Klein unpacks the origin and spread of this conniption in a way that brought me a whole new perspective as the partner and friend of individuals with ASD. It also incited within me a whole new level of rage about being pictured next to someone whose actions convey a reckless ignorance towards the neurodivergent community.

It is tempting to paint RFK Jr., in his diagonal views, as emblematic of our chaotic, destructive political landscape as we speed toward the 2024 election in which he is an announced candidate. The gist of his skepticism stems from the ways in which capitalism has co-opted the landscape of medical science, practice, and administration in our country.

Okay, fine.

But to use your family’s gilded name to twist that critique into a rejection of preemptive, life-saving medical care is in itself a form of corruption. RFK Jr. may truly believe he is using his platform and presidential campaign to reflect the concerns of modern Americans. But as in all things Mirror World, the reflection is crooked. The irony is he can endanger the well-being of others while— as a white man, a lawyer, and member of the Kennedy clan—be safely above the fray and its consequences. There will always be a net to catch him, unlike the people who hear his rallying cry and act upon it.

Beyond the shadows of RFK Jr.’s misadventures and my cringe-worthy encounter with him, what I am truly concerned about is you, me, and the rest of us. If the final months of 2023 taught me anything, it’s that the privilege given by the western world is best exercised in the inexorable symbiosis between micro and macro-ecosystemic concerns. I use that terminology because we so easily lose sight of the reality that we’re all passengers and partners in a fragile miracle—the larger terrestrial ecosystem.

There is a grievance, especially in the spiritual and leftist realms I occupy, that humanity has lost touch with its place in nature, and it is from this well that the ills of modernity have spoiled and corrupted us. What this fails to take into account is that the toxic traits within our species echo relatively neutral patterns in nature. We may have forgotten about the ground under our feet, and the many life-supporting mycelial structures below it that nurture us, but humans in all their brilliance and destructiveness are extensions of the earth itself. We are the ecosystem.

Much like RFK Jr., I have long been concerned about what has made its way into our proverbial and literal waters. This is where the photo of us seems uncomfortably to act like a portal: Kennedy and I have both been deeply radicalized by our experiences in the health care system. Although we now arguably sit in opposite corners on many issues, there was a time where my timeline very well could have skewed parallel to his.

—afc

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