“Being mad is not going to get a single person vaccinated”

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Transcript

Sarah: [00:00:00] There's lots of public health crisises, where it's not about, let's just sit around and meet people where they are and that's not like I, you know, I'm not mad at that approach and I think that's important and I think doing as much work as we can individually to hear people out and, you know, listen to their hesitancy and, you know, take local approaches but at the end of the day, like this is a public health crisis and sometimes with public health crisis is you have to have laws and regulations.

Sarah: This is Sarah

Beth: And Beth. 

Sarah: You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.

Beth: The home of grace-filled political conversations.

Hello everyone and thank you [00:01:00] so much for joining us for a new episode of Pantsuit Politics. We're thrilled that you're here with us. We're thrilled to be here together in Nashville, Tennessee. We are super grateful to Clark Buckner of Relationary Marketing for meeting us in our hotel room with equipment that makes it sound like we are in our home studios and thank you Clark for that assistance and thank you all for joining us.

 We're going to talk today about evictions and president Biden's decision to extend the federal moratorium on evictions as an emergency measure, then we're going to follow up on some of your questions and thoughts about COVID-19, masks and vaccine mandates, anti mandate mandates, uh, and outside of politics, we're in talk about food in what I have a feeling will be a characteristically wide ranging fashion.

Before we get started, Sarah, we really want to invite everyone to join us in Waco.

Sarah: [00:01:45] Yes, we're so excited. We will be at the Hippodrome with Clint Harp of Man Unmade podcast on Saturday, September 25th. This is our first live event in forever. We had such a [00:02:00] delightful time on Clint's podcast and develop such a warm, fun friendship with him. When he said, you guys got to come to Waco sometime we said, oh great. Let's get out our calendars Clint and let's really make that a reality. I think it is going to be the most fun, just the whole weekend. We have a VIP event. Of course we have the live event. I've never been to Waco before. Apparently it is really really great weekend destination with wonderful food and shopping. We have so many of you planning girls' weekends or couples weekends to come to the show. Just we want to see your faces. Okay. That's the rally. We want to see your faces. We want to have fun. We want to laugh together in a room and have some breakthroughs. I'll probably cry. Let's just be honest. So get your tickets. The link is in the show notes and come hang out with us in Waco.

Beth: [00:02:59] So let's talk [00:03:00] about the eviction moratorium, which has made a lot of headlines this week in part, because it's been a real blame game. We had the eviction moratorium that was in place expiring and right before it expired, we hear from the Biden administration will Congress is going to have to act on this because what the Supreme court said and Congress said, no, the administration needs to act on it. We don't care what the Supreme court said and by the way, why did you just tell us now, as though it weren't publicly available information about when the eviction moratorium would expire? And I think the truth of it might that the priority list is long right now and everything on the priority list is pretty urgent and this just got lost and this getting lost has an enormous effect on a lot of people. 

So since September, the CDC has told us that landlords cannot evict tenants in certain circumstances and those circumstances are pretty broad. When a tenant has used their best efforts to obtain governmental assistance, makes less than $99,000 annually with some other caveats around that and [00:04:00] can't pay for a variety of reasons; substantial loss of income, being laid off, losing a job, having extraordinary medical bills and the CDC says eviction in most of those circumstances is going to mean that a tenant has to go into a place where they're housed with other people and that is a problem in our current public health emergency.

 So the Supreme court expressed an opinion on this without expressing an opinion. There's just an order. It was a five, four vote on that order and we have what is less of an opinion and more like a PS from justice, Brett Kavanaugh. It's just a couple of paragraphs where he says, basically I think this issue is about to be moot because the moratorium is going to expire. If it weren't, I think that this has probably exceeded the CDCs authority and the congressional action would be needed to extend that and based on that we have this whole dialogue about whether president Biden has violated his constitutional oath because he has said he [00:05:00] didn't want to extend this without Congress because he didn't think it would survive in court. So it's a whole mess of political finger-pointing the upshot of which is in 80% of us counties, covering 90% of the US population, right now landlords still cannot evict the vast majority of tenants. 

Sarah: [00:05:18] Yeah. I think there's two things going on here. I think there's the constitutional debate and the political debate. I don't think it got lost. I don't think there was political support for it in Congress. I think the white house said the Supreme court made it clear, you have to do this and Congress couldn't get it done for a lot of reasons. Um, I think that the infrastructure deal is taking up a lot of political will and capital and energy, but I think to certain people, including representative Cori Bush, who has been open about her own struggle with homelessness in her past, it stayed at the very top of the list and so her and members of the progressive caucus camped out on the Capitol steps to bring attention and it worked.

 They stood out there, they got lots and lots of media attention [00:06:00] and increased the pressure on the white house and said, your, you know, Congress couldn't get it done so you've got to do something and I think that, that the political reality of millions of Americans being evicted in the middle of a Delta variant surge was hard to stomach and so they took the strategy that, you know, representative Bush was pretty open about, which was like, just do it. It'll take a while for people to sue and even if it gets overturned, it will offer a little bit of relief and look, the Alabama and Georgia association of realtors have already filed an emergency motion with the US district court of the district of Columbia asking a federal judge to block the implementation because there is, I don't know, I don't know how much of a debate there is constitutionally, whatever the political reality is of whether or not the CDC has the authority to continue to put this eviction moratorium in place.

I think that, you know, president Biden said most constitutional scholars say they don't have the authority, but there's a couple and that seems like enough [00:07:00] to make this, this political reality. Release the pressure just just enough, right? I think that what's really happening with Congress when it comes to the eviction moratorium is like, everybody knows that this isn't a simple, easy situation. That no one wants millions of people homeless in the middle of a pandemic and also this isn't just about giant corporate landlords exploiting the little guy, just taking this moment for what everything is worth, because there's a lot of small landlords who are facing foreclosure, who are facing really, really stark economic realities in the face of this moratorium that's been in place for almost a year and that that is something that I think Congress really wants state and local officials to use the massive amount of money they sent their way to use to relieve. 

Like, I think that we're having this debate about the white house and Congress and the [00:08:00] Supreme court, when really there is money, I know my local area got a lot of money that they're using for things that have nothing to do with the pandemic that should be used to help release the pressure, not just on the renters, but on the landlords. The solution here, isn't keep these people in place forever. The solution is use this money to pay their dang rent and I think that's what the we should be talking about is that the state and local officials should be using the, you know, basically Christmas in July as my local Congressman described it to ease some of this pressure instead of acting like it's a problem that only Congress or only the white house can solve.

Beth: [00:08:40] Do you remember I used to be a Republican? It's been awhile. One of the reasons that that was true for me and, and, you know, I have since come to learn that, but fewer Republicans meant this than I thought, but one of the reasons that was true for me is because I really do think local problem solving makes sense in the vast majority of situations and I think housing is a very, [00:09:00] very localized problem and so while I care very much about people having houses and I think homelessness is a disgrace in the United States, a country with our level of wealth to have so many people who don't have houses is a disgrace that we ought to be fixing pandemic or not. To me extending this moratorium probably is just another extension of stress because it is another extension of stress for tenets who relief or not, might not be able to afford the places they're currently living and an extension of stress for landlords who relief or not are having problems with credit on their own and trying to figure out how sustainable this is in the longterm.

I just read on our July break, the novel Anxious People. It's one of my favorite books I've read in a long time and it put more succinctly than any, um, think piece I've ever read that the global economy is fueled by who gets credit [00:10:00] and that's the whole ball of wax, right? Who has access to credit determines everything and I think this moratorium put so much pressure on everybody in a landlord tenant relationship in terms of their access to credit for the future. That book also calls into question what happens to an economy where houses are not homes, they're investments and I think there's a really important question to ask about that.

And I don't think that's an individualized question. I'm not mad at any landlords. I do think we need to look at the housing situation and say, in terms of our housing supply, are we making good choices about what we view a house to mean and who benefits from it and where the creditor steps in and what all of that entails and clearly we can't solve that today. What I think we can do today is say to your point, Sarah, this money that was infused into states and local jurisdictions should go not only to help people pay people's dang rent, but also [00:11:00] for new coordinators and new caseworkers and new programs that help ensure that people are sustainably housed for the longterm. Not just that I keep you here today, but I help you make a plan for tomorrow that removes this unimaginable to me, level of stress of not knowing what happens next month. It's unjust for so many people to have that level of stress and we have these federal funds available right now that yes, relate to the pandemic and ensuring that we don't have a flood of people in shelters passing COVID-19 around, but also to help us alleviate a very long-term problem with a more long term outlook.

Sarah: [00:11:39] I 100% agree and I think that this issue while I think the immediate pressure can be best relieved by state and local authorities is an area where there is room for federal action. Jerusalem Demsas's who's a reporter at Vox has been doing some amazing work on [00:12:00] this. She has in an article called "Homeownership Brings Out the Worst in You." and it's exactly what you're saying. Like this issue is only one COVID manifestation and there's lots of ways in which Covid manifests and accelerates problems and policy across our country but this is definitely one of them where, you know, because our homes are our investments, they bring out our worst, most selfish instincts when it comes into policy.

 We all care about homelessness, but nobody wants affordable housing in their neighborhood because it might drop the value of their home and when your home is your retirement, because there's no real social safety net, then it brings out some really bad behavior. It allows people, particularly white, privileged people to slow lots of good policy, be it mass transit, be it affordable housing that people say they want until it comes to their neighborhood and I think that that's where the federal [00:13:00] government can come in, right.




 I think that there's issues like this eviction moratorium, where we see state and local officials, um, close to the ground, being able to relieve some of that pressure, but sometimes the state and local officials can see the solution as clear as day, but without some national regulation and some national cover, they need political cover because this stuff is so, you know, unpopular when it finally becomes a reality in reality, where you live and I think that's where we need federal policy. That's where we need. If we're worried about affordable housing and homelessness as we should be, because it is a disgrace to be one of the richest countries in the world and have people in camps and sleeping on the street, that is a disgrace. It is not representative of our values, but the political reality, because of the way we do housing policies, it's hard, it's hard and I think that's where we need the federal government to come in and provide some political cover. 

Beth: [00:13:59] I [00:14:00] don't disagree with that. I do think that the timing surrounding the exploration of this eviction moratorium and the position that, that leadership in Congress took and the position that the progressive caucus in Congress took and the position the white house took all forced us into a binary where the options were president Biden extends the moratorium, or we do nothing because we don't care and I think that that really leaves behind the kind of problem solving that we're talking about here and that that's a shame because I think the result of this action is going to be ultimately pretty bad for both tenants and landlords and pretty politically unpopular and put everybody in a worse situation than we could have been if everybody had started talking about this publicly earlier and spent more time coordinating with state and local officials. 

Next up, we're going to talk more about COVID-19 because certainly the Delta and continues to occupy space in our hearts and our [00:15:00] minds and our communities and we particularly want to highlight some of the comments that we heard back from you all after Tuesday's episode.

Sarah: [00:15:20] Every time we have an episode, we post a discussion thread on Patreon for our patrons to really sort of share their feedback and their concerns and it was a very spirited discussion after Tuesday's episode. In one episode, obviously we started to talk about the surge. We didn't have time to get into all the vaccine mandates, which we now have particularly coming from New York city over this past week but as we were talking about it, you said, I just, this is the angriest I've seen people. I just think people are so, so angry. 

Beth: [00:15:53] As I've reflected on that, it is helping me to see that as a [00:16:00] manifestation of the intimacy of this issue because COVID-19 unlike a lot of other crises that we face as a country affects us on such a deeply personal level, down to every interaction we have with another human being and so if I think about this as being part of our intimacy with one another, I can find a little bit more Ram in myself about it. You know, Kelsey, one of our longtime supporters who always comments so thoughtfully on our work said, I just need some space to be mad, right now and Kelsey, like, I hear you, me too. You can have that space. I am not telling anybody what to feel because I have a complex soup of feelings myself. I am thinking mostly about what's effective in our doing and I think if I consider this problem, as one of intimacy, I can think more productively about what's effective in our doing with each other if that makes sense. 

Sarah: [00:16:55] Anger is a secondary emotion. I have to remind myself of that all the time, because [00:17:00] anger is often my default. I'm an Enneagram one. I don't have any trouble getting mad. I don't feel as much anger as some of our audience does towards the unvaccinated. I don't know if that's because as I've talked about before I live in a place where there's a pretty even split between people who take COVID incredibly seriously and people who don't take it seriously at all, where I live, it's not, I mean, I have a vaguely purple location and I, you know, I hate that I even have to use purple to describe COVID because it doesn't feel like it should be political, but you know, it is. That's where we're at because our politics is identity driven and so, because our politics is identity driven, we're going to respond to something like a pandemic through the lens of identity. I mean, that's how we all respond to things. 

We don't do some sort of cool-headed rational analysis as much as we often think that we do and so [00:18:00] I think I just have kind of kept ever-present the ways in which all of the input we experience as human beings in the year of our Lord 2021 can play out and the, and there they're just infinite, right? They're just, that's an infinite amount of information. It's an infinite amount of human relationships and the way that we see and hear and talk to each other, and, you know, I am frustrated that it felt like we were making progress and we are going backwards, but I think I just always held that progress pretty loosely and feeling angry just kind of reminds me of how I felt when Trump was elected. Like I just had to make a decision. Like if I give into this anger, there will be no end to it and so, you know, I have to, to realize, like, I'm not going to convince anybody to get the vaccine through my anger and I have to just sort of [00:19:00] keep that ever-present, but I get it. 

Like, I, you know, my husband at the mere mention that likes school could get postponed or called off, he gets a you know, raging, flame, throwing why did you say, like how dare you even mentioned that that's not going to happen. What's wrong with you? Your energy is terrible. Like, uh, you know, the frustration is there. It's just, it's so hard to, to feel that frustration and not give in to the rage at the people who I feel like are causing this slow down, surge whenever, I mean, slow down in our progress, surgeon, infections, whatever you want to call it. 

Beth: [00:19:44] So you often describe yourself as a COVID moderate and I really liked that phrase from you and I think it describes where I am as well and I think that a huge reason that I can be that is because of where I live, because it and I don't live in a purple place at all. I live in a [00:20:00] very, very red tip of Kentucky, where there is a pretty strong perspective on masking to be sure. What I mean, when I say that my place influences that is that the population density is low and so what I am able to do and not do is quite different than it would be if I were in a high density space and I think that that influences my perspective in ways that I can't untangle and why, again, on this issue, like the eviction moratorium, I find myself thinking we really at our, we really are at a moment in this pandemic where I think restrictions and guidance needed to be interpreted locally, not based just on transmission, but based on things like population density based on outdoor space, availability and climate, based on how new your school buildings are and the ventilation in those school buildings. There are so many factors.

 I read an article this morning called "Dance Till We Die" by Ari Shullman that was I [00:21:00] thought brilliantly written because he was talking about our COVID security theater, the things that we do and that we fight with each other about, because some of us believe they're incredibly important and some of us say that's really silly and ineffective and because that silly ineffective I'm going to distrust everything else that you say. Things like wiping down all the surfaces in public spaces when we know that that's not how COVID gets transmitted at this point, the cloth mask versus the in 95 masks versus no mask. Those fights that we have put a lot of energy into that really haven't done a lot to help us and he is not against security theater.

He writes in this article about how important theater is in some ways to telling people I care about this too. You are not shouldering the burden and the pain of this alone. It's just, it's really well-written and I'll link it in the show notes but I was thinking about that and about the wide range of emotions we heard from listeners. We heard from people who have someone they love, or they themselves have an [00:22:00] autoimmune condition and they aren't sure how the vaccine will interact with that condition and so weighing the risks of getting COVID and having COVID interact with that condition versus the vaccine, interacting with that condition that is hard and deeply personal and way out of that caricature I described on Tuesday that I can convince myself as going on with unvaccinated people. Right.  

I can convince myself that unvaccinated means one thing, and that is just not true demographically. It is not true in terms of people's personal stories and that's the point I was trying to make. Not that everybody is that thing, but that I can tell myself that and get really mad about it, instead of having space for the places people are coming from. All of that to say, when I consider what New York is doing, I'm supportive of it to the extent that it matters as a non new Yorker, because in a place like New York, I can understand that population density, just having traveled there enough, I can see how I would want those restrictions in place [00:23:00] if I were there and I don't think they make sense for my community. 

I don't think it would make sense in my community for the local government to say, if you want to eat at a restaurant, you have to be a vaccinated and a whole bunch of factors go into that but it's why I, I would generally be against a federal approach at this point, because I think we're having very different experiences based on where we are. Oh, 

Sarah: [00:23:21] Americans love to eat out. I wouldn't be mad about a federal requirement that you can go into a restaurant with vaccine card. That';; send Door Dash through the roof but cause I think we're, you know, we're, we're through with the carrot phase, right? It's time for the stick phase because at the end of the day, you know, It's not like we don't have experience with this. It's not like we don't have experience with when we live in a big group of people we're not all going to see things the same way and sometimes for the good of the group, there's going to have to be some strict requirements that involve punishment. [00:24:00] That's what we did with seatbelts. That's what we do with cigarettes. 

There's lots of public health crisises, where it's not about, let's just sit around and meet people where they are and that's not like I, you know, I, I'm not mad at that approach and I think that's important and I think, you know, doing as much work as we can individually to hear people out and, you know, listen to their hesitancy and, you know, take local approaches but at the end of the day, like this is a public health crisis and sometimes with public health crisis is you have to have laws and regulations and you have to have strict approaches that require people to do what is best for them than when they don't want to do it.

 We do all kinds of things that are best for us every day and sometimes that is, you know, the freedom to do that is in your best interest and sometimes the government has to stand up, stand up and say, I'm sorry, I know you want to do that, but it's not in your best interests and it's enough of a risk to the rest of us that we're going to require you to do something different and I just think like inquiry reaching that point because, you know, if we allow enough [00:25:00] surges, if we allow enough variance, then we're going to be in a place where it evolves enough of the vaccine is no longer effective. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants that and so I just, you know, I think that we're reaching the point, particularly with Delta to me, I guess the reason that I'm not mad is because I want solutions. I just want to deal with the pragmatic reality before us and being mad at people is not going to get a single damn person vaccinated and I want people vaccinated and if that requires mandates, if that requires passports, if that requires punishment, I'm fine with that. 

Let's just get it done because it's not like this is a new experience for us with other health emergencies or other public health issues like, like, like I said, like seatbelts or, or, you know, any number of other things we've had to deal with and it's, it's time to just say, okay, what's going to get it done. Let's just get it [00:26:00] done. 

Beth: [00:26:00] Well, I don't disagree with that. I think that my, um, subtle departure would be in terms of who's making that decision because the thing that I have learned more than anything else from this pandemic is that if you don't have community consensus, doesn't really matter what the regulation is. I saw a reporter in Kentucky tweet about asking governor Bashir if he was going to consider any mask mandate and Kentucky and he looked at the reporter kind of weirdly and said, do you think it would work? And that's right. That's absolutely right and I am tired of asking people who work at Walmart or Kroger to enforce that federal policy or that state level policy.

Now I am a hundred percent behind the restaurants who on their own decide to mandate vaccine cards, the public events. I wouldn't get on a cruise ship unless everybody had to be vaccinated to save my life and I think that, you know, [00:27:00] those are decisions. I am more, the, the hardest opinion I have about all of this is that I am against the anti mandate legislation. The states that are saying you cannot, local mayor or, or county commission or school board, you cannot decide that people have to be vaccinated to be here. You can not decide that people have to wear a mask. I think that is incredibly wrong and flies in the face of everything we should have learned during the pandemic, but also flies in the face of federalism and a lot of what we're supposed to be about as a country.

So that is my hardest opinion and then my second opinion is I am totally supportive of the private sector, making decisions for themselves about what their employees are going to be asked to do and what they're going to ask of their customers and then kind of third down from that is I do think where sweeping governmental mandates come into play, those ought to be done in as limited scope as possible based on the facts of the ground, [00:28:00] because that's where I think there is the most possibility for community consensus and compliance. If we are just doing it broadly with as little consensus as we have about how to handle this right now, I think we're just feeding the fire of backlash about control and on both ends of a spectrum of, I want more control. This isn't enough.

 Um, one of our listeners Elizabeth described seeing a school board meeting play out where you had a superintendent proposing that kids who are under 12 wear masks to school and kids who are above 12 optionally wear masks to school and the, the meeting erupts in parents who think that's not far enough versus parents who think that's way too far and I just want out of that binary and I hope that even though we're never going to have a hundred percent of people saying yes, good idea. That smaller places where those decisions are made, help us get past some of that log.

Sarah: [00:28:53] Yeah. I mean, I just think though the problem is you're never going to get community consensus. Right. I was listening to a, this American [00:29:00] life where they were talking about how in Utah, even at like the school board level, people were turning on the church of latter day saints and accusing the leaders of the church of being in on some mass conspiracy. I mean, if you can't get consensus in that community at small levels, like the school board, you got your work cut out for you, you know? And that's where I think, like, I don't know if I, I worry that we've passed that point. We've tried it and you know, if you're asking people to, to carry the burden and you're worried about frontline workers, Lord, I'm worried about school board members.

They might as well be frontline workers what they're being asked to deal with between the critical race theory and mask mandates. Like that that's too big of a lift for them. We need some societal pressure. We need some like you know, real, real, like just, this is what we're going to do, and you can get in line, or you can get left behind because human beings respond to that and I think that that's, you know, with, with the public health situation currently before us. The solution is we [00:30:00] vaccinate our way out of this pandemic and it's clear, you know, the science is clear, the research is clear and it is also clear that there are people who will not be convinced and so the consequences need to come. Right and I don't mean like, I want them to die of COVID. 

I mean, like their lives need to get hard and they needed to decide how badly they want to stay in that position and I just think like, you know, as much as I think there's a lot of like local and state variants, and I totally agree about the anti mass mandates. If I was an Iowa and teachers were getting, you know, criminal consequences for stuff like quarantining or telling me my child would be exposed. Oh my God, I would be coming out of my skin. That would make me so mad. That is so ridiculous in the exact opposite direction of where we need to be going and I just think like, to prevent this from getting worse, to prevent [00:31:00] this from evolving into something that is not responsive to vaccines and we just need to take a hard look around and realize like the pragmatic reality is we have to motivate, persuade, lean on pressure people to get the vaccine with every, the single tool in our toolbox from local, all the way up to the federal government.

Beth: [00:31:26] I mostly agree with that and I also think about the people, you know, you said that we needed to make people's lives hard who don't get the vaccine. I think about the people whose lives are already hard and that hardness is part of their calculus of whether I get the vaccine or not. I mean, I think there are some really difficult calls here. When I said that not everyone is that caricature of kind of a Q Anon person who doesn't want to get vaccinated, some of what I heard back from the audiences. Yes, they are. That's who they are in my community. That's exactly who it is and I hear you. Um, and that's, that's probably mostly true in my community as well, but I live in a mostly [00:32:00] white community and if you look at the data, there are a lot of unvaccinated people who are not white, who have this real distressed still of the, of the medical community who think like, if this were a true no-brainer, then the military would be mandating it, that it would be not on an emergency use authorization anymore and in some of those demographics compliance with masking is very high. 

They're totally willing to wear a mask, they're not willing to get the vaccine. So again, we're not talking about one kind of person and I think this really punishment oriented approach which again, I support just depending on who's making the choice is not going to work for everybody. What I really want to kind of pull back from this conversation and highlight is that here we are Sarah and Beth to people who view the science almost identically on COVID, two people who have made very similar choices about our lives during the pandemic. Two people who are both vaccinated and we have like [00:33:00] some pretty serious disagreement about what ought to happen from here and I think keeping that in mind helps us all, I hope hold some complexity around this.

 We are, we are in a really hard situation and it's that hard situation around intimate aspects of our lives and if you think about what happens in intimate relationships, when hard things come, a whole lot of stress bursts. We can treat the people that we love worse than anybody else because of the stress in intimate situations and I feel like that's, what's happening around COVID right now and if I can just kind of keep coming back to that, Hey, this is the human condition. There is like not a single piece of us that is immune from the COVID analysis. Of course we're treating each other in bad ways. Of course we're stressed. Of course, we're tired. Of course we're angry. It helps me a lot. 

Sarah: [00:33:52] Well, and I think the thing to remember is that if I've learned anything from COVID, is that change things change quickly. We're not in this [00:34:00] position forever. We're not going to be stuck in a Delta surge forever. We're not going to be dealing with entrenched vaccine refusal forever. That's not going to be the position that we're in. That's why I feel strongly that it's like it's time for the stick phase, because I think we might be surprised by how quickly that tipping point presents itself. I mean, look around you. I mean, look around at the places that are experiencing Delta surges, where you have a lot of fear, motivating vaccine surges as well. 

That humans as a group, you know, like it can feel like we're stuck in this place forever and very rapidly things can change and that's why I think with this after a year and a half of a pandemic in the middle of a really intense surge, you know, we did hit the 70% goal that the Biden administration had set for vaccines. Like it [00:35:00] just feels like the tipping point is right there and just with a little more pressure put in the right places that we could get to a point where we are vaccinating our way finally, out of the situation and I just, you know, I'm just, I'm ready and I can't, I know I'm not the only one. That's why we're also pissed off all the time. We're just done. We're tired, frustrated. We're, you know, it feels like everybody's ready to move on about thinking about their fellow citizens for awhile, right.

To like be stressing all the time, the psychology or the hesitancy or the behavior to be walking around, whether mask drive you crazy or whether you wish everyone would wear a mask, right. That we all are just ready to like move freely through the world. I'm ready to just move freely through the world without thinking about what other people are doing and how it involves my health all the dang time and I know everybody else is as well and I think that place could be closer than we think it is with the right social pressure.

[00:36:00] Beth: [00:36:09] Sarah, outside of politics, you suggested that we talk about what I am and not eating. What can I, what can I tell you? 

Sarah: [00:36:14] Well, you've, you've changed your dietary approach and I just thought you've been in it like a month now. Surely you've you've garnered some insight or to share with our audience who are endlessly fascinated with, uh, what you're eating, what you're not eating.

Beth: [00:36:29] So back in April, I started eating gluten-free and dairy-free after a series of tests and a conversation with my doctor about what might help with inflammation in my body and so I did that for two months and then, uh, in the third month of thinking about what I eat differently, I decided to go, uh, mostly vegan and I say mostly because I feel like what has been very important to me from the beginning here is to remember that I'm choosing this. So I try never to say, I can't have that. I'm choosing not to [00:37:00] have it at least to myself and definitely in front of my girls, because I do not want to establish any kind of weirdness about food and diet and body image at home.

So I've tried to be very flexible. So mostly vegan, meaning if I'm at a restaurant, I do not interrogate whether the oatmeal was prepared with milk or water. There is a Thai restaurant that we love where I get vegetable fried rice, even though it has a little bit of egg in it. So I'm not strict about it, but that's mostly my approach and I feel like when I made that decision to cut meat primarily after having been gluten-free and dairy-free, that's when my body really changed and my digestion really changed my sleep and energy changed. I wasn't as hungry anymore. It was all like counterintuitive. All the things that I thought would be difficult about it were actually the things that have made me love doing it. I think I've developed, um, a real appreciation in this process for how body chemistry is different for everybody. So I'm not going to walk around saying [00:38:00] everybody ought to eat the way that I eat. 

I think my body fluctuates day to day, there are probably days when I could have like a dinner roll and be fine. You know, I'm just not very tempted to do that because I do feel really good. I think the thing that has surprised me the most is how quickly like preparing meat for my family has started to feel kind of yucky to me because I didn't walk into this with any sort of ethical framework or conviction. I have concerns about factory farming. I think that a lot of the way we approach food in this country is messed up, but that wasn't my motivating force. It was much more about how will I feel in my body. Will I feel lighter? Will I feel healthier? Will I feel more energetic? But really rapidly my feelings, like just my tangible physical reaction to me has changed and that's been pretty weird. Yeah. 

Sarah: [00:38:50] I don't like to prepare meat, so I don't cook this for the big reason I don't cook. I don't like to chop. I don't like to deal with raw meat, it grosses me out. Well, can I share my one concern about you being vegan? 

Beth: [00:38:58] Sure. 

Sarah: [00:38:59] I think you're too [00:39:00] nice to be vegan. Um, as my main concern, I feel like, uh, that you are too worried about being nice and not making people uncomfortable and I feel like I need to be your vegan advocate and be like, Hey, she needs some beans. Don't you people have some beans that she can eat? Um, so I just, that's, that's really my only concern. I worry that you're a little too nice to be vegan that you have to fight for your fight for your food choices when we're out on the road. 

Beth: [00:39:23] Oh, thank you. It is harder to eat on the road than it is at home, for sure and I think that's one thing I want to say. I recognize that I am at the right moment in my life to do this because I have done a lot of therapy. So I have a lot of self-care tools that I haven't had before so food can mean something different to me now than it has at other points in my life. I don't mean to keep talking about this sermon series at my church, but it's really on my mind. We've been talking about the Lord's prayer and, uh, in the most recent installment in this series, my pastor was talking about temptation and she brought up the Hamilton song "Saying No to This" and how [00:40:00] whenever. 

So if you, if you don't know Hamilton at this point, Alexander Hamilton is really trying to get his plan through Congress to establish basically the US treasury, as we know it today, and he is stressed and tired and working late, and his family is out of town and he meets a Mariah Reynolds and has an affair and he sings this song about how he just doesn't know how to say no to this and he talks about all the stress that he's under in the song and my pastor said, I always want to yell at him, I know how to say no to this. Get some sleep! Exercise, man, eat a good meal, like take care of yourself and this temptation will be different for you and so I really have thought about that a lot in relation to my eating because I have different tools now for situations where my answer used to be go eat some ice cream and I don't mean that in an unkind way to my former self, I was just at a different point in my life and I'm in a new phase of my life and this phase won't be static either and I don't know how this will be for me in the long-term. 

Sarah: [00:40:56] Yeah. I mean, I've had a long sort of journey thinking about [00:41:00] food. I've been, I was a vegetarian for five years. I did go through a little vegan phase, probably. I think it was because Oprah told me to, she did it on her show and so I do what Oprah tells me to, and I think I've definitely, they settled with Michael Pollan, who I love and he probably was like, barely a huge start of my thinking about food journey. Well, I was a vegetarian before I read the Omnivore's dilemma and that book actually ended my vegetarianism, but, you know, I think like it's always, I love his eat food, mostly plants, not too much, like keep it simple. Um, I think that food is such a source of joy and comfort and just enjoyment in my life.

I'm also blessed cause I live with basically a chef and I think, yeah, it's just like when you can start to really take some time and space, especially if you have the privilege and the resources to think about how food makes you feel and how you feel in your body. Like, it's just, it's always going to be a blessing. That awareness is always so [00:42:00] powerful and I think it really increases the enjoyment of food and I think the moments in my life where food felt sort of like it was, it was, it was a burden. It was adding to my stress instead of releasing. It is because there was sort of like a lack of awareness and it was, I was using it, like you said, like to, to, to, to mute that awareness instead of sort of leaning into it and, you know, I think anytime in my life, I've thought about what I'm eating, explored, what I'm eating, tried new things like it's always, it's always been a positive experience. So I'm just so glad that that's what it's doing for you too. 

Beth: [00:42:38] Well, and I want to be completely honest. There's a sense of loss as well. It's been a really positive experience in how I feel in my body and the truth is I feel best in my body on the days when I mostly eat raw food. When I cut up some carrots and have a salad and some fruit and some nuts, that is when I feel really, really good and food is communal and it is [00:43:00] hard to not just grab a slice of pizza when everybody's hanging outside, you know, ordering pizza together. Not because I want the pizza, but because I want to be part of the group in that way. And because there is a separateness, when you are concerned about what you're eating in a different way than everybody else and I feel really lucky that I don't have an allergy or something where I really have to enforce that separateness, where I can be a little bit more flexible about it.

Uh, and it's given me a vastly new appreciation for people who do navigate food allergies and other situations where they really cannot have something. Uh, that that's a hard way to be in a society, which I think is all of human society where food is so communal and such a part of how we connect and relate to each other. Uh, so I don't want to be too rosy about how it's been either. It's been really good for how I feel in my body. It's been very difficult in some of my relationships and those moments where you do just like want to break bread with someone and it's hard to say, sorry, but I don't eat bread.

Sarah: [00:43:58] Well, you know, it was really interesting I think [00:44:00] when I think back about my food journey, probably the, one of the most pivotal moments is when I was a sophomore in college. I spent the summer between my freshman and sophomore year in Italy for five weeks and it was an incredibly, uh, I mean, it was an amazing food journey. Any trip to Italy is an amazing food journey, but I realized like it really colored the way I thought about food and the way I ate, you know, the, the expression as Americans eat to live, Italians live to eat. I learned to eat slower when I went to Italy, I came back eating slower. I'll still eat pretty slow and I think I just, I try to cause it's really easy. You know, even if you're reading somebody like Michael Pollan to start thinking about food as something like food is only in relationship to your physical body, when the truth is food is in powerful relation to your spiritual and psychological health and the way that you move about the world with other people, not just like in community, like a breaking bed, but I mean, it affects our emotions. It affects it's something we do three times a day or more often and it's like, so hugely impactful [00:45:00] on how we feel about ourselves and not just how we feel in our body and I think like, man Italians, the French, like they get that, they get that so well and I think like having that experience of watching the way in which they, they relate to food as a part of life, instead of just at like a part, like a part of our physical health was really, really powerful to me and I think like, like I said, like being married to somebody who just loves food, just loves it.

He, my husband is an amazing cook. And we have developed that love and, you know, it's, it's so fun. Like that's such a huge part of our travel and what we teach our kids that it's like, it's just such a fun part of life and balancing that with it also affects how you feel. You know, like it affects how your physical body feels and I'm not sure, you know, I think we've gotten better in America at not coordinating siloing off our physical health from everything else. We get better. You know, I feel like every day [00:46:00] and the way we talk and think about food is so such an integral part of that and then I think about a lot in my life and like, um, I'm still trying to figure out, I think we all are. I think we're all still trying to figure out, like, how do we, how do we talk about food? How do we think about food in relation to our, her physical health and the realities that, you know, Some food, if it makes you happy,  it makes you feel bad and how that, what that means for like in our communal spaces and with our, like our souls. I mean, I think food is, it is important to your soul and I think that that's just that I think it's one of the most important conversations we can have.

Beth: [00:46:35] Yeah. My intention is exactly aligned with everything that you just said. I would like to end up in a long-term space that is kind of that flexitarian approach where I'm really uh, mostly eating vegan, but I have some space for other options where I'm mostly gluten-free, but I have some space for other options. I want to give my body some more time to kind of reset and, and heal I think from some of what's not been good for it, [00:47:00] but I do really want to stay focused on the fact that I don't think any food is bad or morally wrong and I am not looking to remake my body in any particular way. I just want to feel as good as I can and, and eat in a way that, that is, that is good for me on both the physical and kind of spiritual and communal levels. 

Sarah: [00:47:20] Yeah. I mean, that's the one that's always so hard for me cause I'm a one I like to ascribe moral value to things and it is it's so I know we're taught to do that and it, it, but again, it's like, it's so hard because I think, well, there is food that makes me feel bad. That doesn't mean it is bad, but it makes me feel bad and it's just always that line is one I'm always still learning to, to think about and walk carefully. 

Beth: [00:47:40] Well, I think a part of, um, eating mostly vegan and in a household where no one else is doing that for me has been to get really clear on the fact that what's on my plate is not a judgment of what's on anybody else's plate and vice versa. I don't, I don't care what makes you feel good in your body. I hope you eat it and enjoy it and it's delicious for you [00:48:00] and I would just like that same consideration back. 

Sarah: [00:48:02] Well, and the good news is we do it so many times a day, we get a chance to start over.

Beth: [00:48:05] Just to practice all over all the time. 

Sarah: [00:48:07] All the time. 

Beth: [00:48:08] Well, thank you all so much for joining us for this discussion. We're so glad you're here. We appreciate your feedback. We'll continue to think about it as we prepare episodes for next week. We hope that you'll have the best weekend available to you.

Beth: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.  

Alise Napp is our managing director.

Sarah: Megan Hart is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music. 

Beth: Our show is listener supported. Special thanks to our executive producers. 

Executive Producers (Read their own names):  Martha Bronitsky, Linda Daniel, Ali Edwards, Janice Elliot, Sarah Greepup, Julie Haller, Helen Handley, Tiffany Hassler, Barry Kaufman, Molly Kohrs.

The Kriebs, Laurie LaDow, Lilly McClure, David McWilliams, Jared Minson, Emily Neesley, Danny Ozment, The Pentons, Tawni Peterson, Tracy Puthoff, Sarah Ralph, Jeremy Sequoia, Karin True.

Beth: Amy Whited, Emily Holladay, Katy Stigers, Joshua Allen, Morgan McHugh, Nichole Berklas, Paula Bremer and Tim Miller

Sarah: To support Pantsuit Politics, and receive lots of bonus features, visit patreon.com/pantsuit politics. 

Beth: You can connect with us on our website, PantsuitPoliticsShow.com. Sign up for our weekly emails and follow us on Instagram.

Sarah: [00:49:37] I saw Alise's face, face change and then that started picking up on the mic. Is that, are they vacuuming outside the room?Just the hallway and also now I'm hungry.

Beth: [00:49:47] That should be the outtake, yeah, that's good.

Alise Napp4 Comments