Is Stranger Danger Killing America? Covid, Monkeypox and Compassion

Watching the behavior towards COVID and monkeypox of some of the folks that live in my home town of San Francisco, as well as our federally appointed health officials, I’m left swimming in the deep end of the pool searching for explanations. I’d rather come up with a reason that’s compassionate, something that doesn’t make my fellow American a bigotted, uncaring murderer, and frankly, lately, it’s been kind of tough to do that. We lost all our COVID mitigations months ago, masking is gone; indoor everything is back regardless of case counts, hospitalizations, deaths, or any other metric that might be tracked; institutions paid lip service to ventilation, and then mostly did nothing; and finally, they’re playing the AIDs game with Monkepox, asking us to believe that it’s only a problem for men who have sex with other men, never mind that kids and women are catching it as well.

With all this input, in trying to come up with a compassionate solution regarding my peers’ complete and utter lack of compassion, I was nearing wit's end. And then it occurred to me, maybe the whole irrational thing can be hung on a campaign that started decades ago: Stranger Danger. Stranger Danger was a phrase coined—as near as anyone can tell—in 1963 in Austin, TX when the local constabulary rolled out a new campaign against child molestation in the form of a poster portraying two kids on the run with the phrase ‘Stranger Danger’ emblazoned above them.

I’ve noticed that poeple who call for mitigations to be struck down seem to believe that the pandemic is all a problem that ‘other people’ have—whether the ‘others’ are transit riders, gay men, poor people, disabled people, or seniors—not a problem that… you know… properly sheltered affluent people of a given age range and race need to worry themselves about. In other words, it seems like their main concern—which they feel they’ve handily rectified—is simply to avoid the sick strangers.

The foundations of this new theory of mine were laid a few months ago when the ‘invisible wall of immunity’ supporters finally said what they really meant. For those of you who might not remember—it’s been a long pandemic—the invisible wall believers held that it was ok that children didn’t have vaccines available because the vaccinated adults around them would provide an invisible wall of immunity. 

Yeah, it sounded crazy to me too. I mean, I’m big, but not big enough to block every air current and droplet that might flow in the direction of a kid. Turns out it wasn’t crazy, it’s just that I was too stupid, apparently, to understand what the whole system really meant. The proponents of this belief finally admitted that yes, their thought process had been—all along—that you of course, wouldn’t take your precious children around anyone that wasn’t vaccinated. Therefore, your children would be in no danger. So, again with the strangers. Just keep your kids away from strangers and everything will be well with the world. Right? That’s what all us good parents were supposed to be doing anyway right?

And, that brings us to Monkeypox. I’ve heard, again and again, that this is a problem only for men who have sex with men, bringing a new acronym to my attention: MSM. However, here’s what the CDC and WHO scientists were quoted as saying in a recent article on NPR’s website:

“The CDC says the risk of contracting monkeypox in the U.S. is "believed to be low," but anyone who comes into close contact with an individual carrying the disease is at risk of infection.

The current outbreak is spreading from human-to-human contact. You could develop an infection from droplet respiratory particles by spending too much time face-to-face with a monkeypox carrier, the WHO warns.”

Work through the mental math with me. Person to person contact is what spreads the disease. If the CDC says the chances are believed to be low at the moment, that means two things. First, they simply don’t think there are that many cases for you, I, or themselves to come in contact with. Second, it also means they frankly aren’t quite sure how many cases there are right now. Once again, the CDC and other doctors in the United States have played the othering game also known as Stranger Danger. Out one side of their mouths they tell you that only gay men contract the disease while out of the other side they tell you that it can only be spread through close personal contact, so… just avoid contact with gay men I suppose?

Yeah… But, in addition to that being incredibly homophobic, we’re right back at the invisible wall theory. Which is just so much nonsense. Allow me to demonstrate.

My seven year old daughter and I went to the wedding of a childhood friend of mine and his now husband a few weeks back, both men are gay, as all men who get married are I suppose. But that’s not where I’m headed with this. As a matter of course, I checked to see if the kid and I could take a bus to the ceremony so I could have a drink with the rest of the revelers without having to worry about driving. Sure enough, there was a bus that fit the bill. It was a 12 minute ride with an 8 minute walk at the end. All duded up, we donned our N95s, waited at the stop, and when the time came, climbed aboard. Once encased in the heavily air conditioned nirvana-like interior of the bus—the wedding was in Albuquerque, air conditioning is important—we immediately noticed that a gentleman stretched across one of the seats, a mostly empty bottle of Bacardi protruding from his pocket, had lapsed into a gentle snooze. 

One stop later, another gentleman hopped on the bus in short shorts, a crop top, and flip flops. He looked at the sleeping passenger, looked back at us—we’d taken up residence on the back row of the bus for our short ride—grinned, leaned over the aisle, and came back up with the man’s bottle of Bacardi. He looked at us again, grinned again, and then began to giggle. So did we. All in all it was a small, delightful, shared moment.

And yet, the NPR article also pointed out, (via the CDC), that, 

“As the virus can spread through skin-to-skin contact, the CDC advises people to exercise caution in situations where one can't maintain some sense of personal space and bumping into others is impractical. In places where clothing is minimal and you could experience that contact, such as crowded raves and clubs, the risk goes up.”

Or, you know, in a public bus during a hot summer. Which brings us to the conclusion of my little example. As the kid and I were exiting the bus, the giggle guy, while I wasn’t looking, jumped up and fist-bumped the hand I was using to hold onto the bus as it slowed to a stop. It was no big deal. I just picked up my hand sanitizer, cleaned my hands, grinned at the guy under my mask, and we all parted ways. 

Here’s the thing though, had the guy spent the morning, or the night before having sex with multiple male partners? Hell, I don’t know, I suppose he could’ve. He could’ve also been doing a three month fast from the carnal pleasures in an effort to expand his inner horizons. He could have been in a long term heterosexual relationship with a woman. The point is he was a stranger to me and even if he hadn’t been, it would have ben impolite of me to ask.

And that brings us back to the real issue: using Stranger Danger in the place of inclusive public healthcare simply doesn’t work. We’re all in this together. Pretending otherwise just isn’t working on so many different levels. It divides us as a people. It sows anger in one group that’s been led to believe they’re insulated, and that therefore none of this should be their problem. It results in inequitable, unfair, unjust health outcomes in the othered groups. Outcomes that will ultimately circle back around to roost with the insulated groups whose isolating behavior, lack of support, and mitigations are causing these outcomes in the first place. 

At the same time, the Stranger Danger crowd is separating themselves from a raft of services they could utilize, one of which, on a small, local scale kept me from having to worry about driving drunk, and on a global scale can keep all of us from having to worry about driving further climate change. There are, of course, other advantages the wide-world offers that the Stranger Danger crowd is missing out on, advantages like a wider sense of community, reduced petty crime, greater outdoor safety, and more active, well-connected kids.

Embracing Stranger Danger rather than a more evolved sense of community has led to an aloof government that’s dropped all mitigations up to and including being able to purchase an adequate supply of vaccines, tests, and antivirals. Viewed through a compassionate lens, this stance of dropped mitigations seems, well, just ignorant, Without that lens, our government’s position begins to look a lot like hate, a hate that in the end is going to negatively impact us all.