Death, Taxes, and the Common Cold
Is being sick the worst thing in the world?
The Left loves to lecture us about climate denialism and election denialism, but I am here to report on a far worse flight from reality: common cold denialism.
Happily, in the household in which I grew up, mild upper respiratory illnesses were not regular occurrences, but our family-wide refusal to acknowledge having come down with such an ailment amounted to an epidemic in its own right.
If my brother and I heard our mother or father sneeze somewhere in our house, we would bound downstairs to commence what amounted to an interrogation process. “You don’t have a cold, do you?” we demanded. Playing along with the charade, our parents would attribute their obvious cold-like symptoms to allergies, the furnace or the air conditioner, or (my personal favorite) talking too much.
Since children learn from their parents, when I encountered the first signs of a developing cold, I, too, searched for any explanation other than the blatantly obvious one. Perhaps my sore throat is from eating something spicy, I cheerfully reckoned. Maybe my nasal congestion is from failing to dust my room, I optimistically hypothesized. Of course, as my cold progressed, it became increasingly difficult to deny the truth of the matter: The consumption of a cup of chili from Wendy’s simply would not result in the emptying of multiple boxes of Kleenex for a week or longer.
I was reminded of my past common-cold denialism over the last week, when, rather wearily but not despairingly, I came down with a cold. It was not so bad. I completed all of my writing assignments, and I started to read Anne Tyler’s debut novel from 1964, If Morning Ever Comes. I mostly stayed home, but I managed to attend my usual church services on Sunday morning and Wednesday evening. Most importantly, at no point amid my sneezing and coughing did I attempt to convince myself that I had anything but a cold.
You see, I no longer dread to the point of denial the arrival of the sniffles. As a character in Hemingway once said of going bankrupt, my change of heart came about gradually and then suddenly. Over time, I began to regard my family’s legacy of dismissing cold symptoms not as a sign of strength—as a kind of stoic refusal to bend to reality—but one of weakness: To so strenuously withhold acknowledgment of a cold was to imply that the cold itself was something to be avoided at all costs.
Then, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I decided that many who eagerly donned masks and stood in line for vaccines and boosters were suffering from the same superstition I once held. The attribution of cold symptoms to something other than a cold is not so different from the attempt to avoid getting sick by wearing a piece of cloth: Both are futile efforts to stamp out the reality of sickness.
On February 13, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in as the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, I cheered with particular enthusiasm—not just because of what Kennedy will do but because of what he would undoubtedly refrain from doing. That is to say, with Kennedy having reached this position of public-health power and influence, I do not fear that some future pandemic will again result in the introduction of such unconstitutional outrages as mask mandates, stay-at-home orders, and vaccine passports.
More broadly, if Kennedy can wean modern medicine off of its tendency to over-prescribe and over-diagnose, he will have done a great and enduring good. RFK Jr. can restore the medical maxim “first, do no harm,” but, even better, he could replace it with Psalm 90, which leads one to a far stronger understanding of the limits of medicine and the bounds of life itself: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
In the same spirit, I endorse the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, but only to the extent that it recognizes that health itself is a transient thing—inevitably and unchangingly so. I say this as one whose parents each died in their 70s, despite living healthy lives. I say this as one whose grandmother died at 100, despite her intermittent trips to the doctor. And I say this as one who accepts that common colds will come as surely as the seasons change—there’s just no point in denying it.
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