Sex & politics are fine — just don't bring up Covid
Breaking taboos in the Harvard Business Review
"Talking about the pandemic has become taboo," someone pointed out to me recently.
At family gatherings, you may find that bringing up sex or politics isn't nearly as troublesome as acknowledging that 2022 was the deadliest year of the pandemic so far — let alone discussing airborne transmission, asymptomatic infection, and the widespread, incurable ruination of Long Covid.
We've taken our collective cues from official public policy:
🙈 see no evil
🙉 hear no evil
🙊 speak no evil
🤷 hope for the best
In professional settings, pointing out that SARS-COV-2 often damages the brain & dysregulates the immune system can feel far more fraught than talking about executive comp, workplace DEI, and whether Todd still wears a MAGA hat (true story).
But silence and the status quo are deadly and disabling, as this exceptional article by the Managing Editor of Harvard Business manager (the German version of Harvard Business Review) makes clear. We're all losing — one infection, one sick leave, one unrelenting statistic at a time.
In the body politic, as in the body, the damage is cumulative and multi-systemic. More is worse. Less is better.
So let's do something about it.
The best way to break a taboo is to break it. Insistently and repeatedly.
And in the process, to compassionately show people that the taboo isn't keeping us safe -- it's putting us in harms way. That it doesn't have to be like this. We're not trapped. We can insist on better options.
The more we talk about hard things, the easier it gets to talk about them.
"Living with the virus" can't mean "living as though the virus doesn't exist" or "living as though it's not airborne" or "living as though Long/Chronic Covid isn't a thing."
Vax & Relax became Let 'er RIP.
This was, and continues to be, a devastating and foreseeable policy failure for which politicians & public health officials should be held accountable.
But just because we can't go back to 2019 doesn't mean we need to go back to 2020. We have more tools. We can use them.
Give this a read.
Share it widely.
Talk about it.
Help break the taboo.