Now that I’m a few weeks into my process to read more this year, I’ve decided to formalize something that’s been bouncing around the back of my head for a while.
I call it my “infinite reading list”.
No, not that there are an infinite number of books I’ll never get around to reading. Something smaller and much more practical.
In a recent political discussion, I discovered something shocking: the person I was talking with attributed the same horrible fears to my side as I did to theirs.
The bullet lists were nearly identical.
Wow.
I don’t believe there’s a short term fix. “How do we change their minds?” is not the question, because minds aren’t going to change any time soon.
The answer is both simpler and more difficult.
Show them they’re wrong.
“Investigators today believe that in the United States the 1918–19 epidemic caused an excess death toll of about 675,000 people”
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History was published in 2004, a full 15 years before COVID-19 would race around the planet beginning in 2019.
My greatest takeaway from this book might well be a sense of disappointment: in our inability to learn, in our government’s inability to lead, and in our inability to understand and trust science.
In other words, not a lot has changed in 100 years. And that’s sad.