Jeanne Marrazzo, new leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, everyone:
Can I make a quick digression? We recently had a long Covid [research] meeting where we had about 200 people, in person. And we can’t mandate mask-wearing, because it’s federal property. But there was a fair amount of disturbance that we couldn’t, and people weren’t wearing masks, and one person accused us of committing a microaggression by not wearing masks.
And I take that very seriously. But I thought to myself, it’s more that people just want to live a normal life. We really don’t want to go back. It was so painful. We’re still all traumatized. Let’s be honest about that. None of us are over it.
So there’s not a lot of appetite for raising an alarm, especially if it could be perceived subsequently as a false alarm.
Edit - thanks for the help in bypassing the paywall.
I actually don't know if I fully agree, there's a lot of really horrible things that deserve shame but it's pretty unproductive as an internalized emotion. In my experience shame mostly just results in defeatism if it's fully internalized. It's useful for undermining a sense of internal worth but isn't productive for anything else, so it's pretty much an inherently reactionary emotion if it's become a self-directed emotional state. But not when it's directed from outside.
It's still useful as like a, social thing. Shaming people good, shame bad, basically