Pantsuit Politics Flashback: 2021

Was this the year that actually broke us?

Pantsuit Politics is celebrating ten years of podcasting this year!

A lot has happened politically, culturally, and personally in the last ten years. This summer, we’re revisiting each of the years we’ve been podcasting with a special flashback episode. Today, we look back at 2021 and present our theory that it - not 2020 - is the year that actually broke us.

Topics Discussed

We’d love for you to celebrate with us! Join us for our 10th birthday celebration in Cincinnati, OH - or with a virtual ticket - tomorrow! Learn more and get your tickets here:

Pantsuit Politics 10th Birthday Celebration

Topics Discussed

• January 6th

• What We Got Wrong in 2021

• Outside of Politics: Nostalgia in a Disrupted Time

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Episode Resources

• Our January 6th Report Book Club episodes

• How to Sleep at Night by Elizabeth Harris (HarperCollins)

• SNL Drivers License Sketch (X)

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

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Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:11] You're listening to a very special episode of Pantsuit Politics. We are continuing our summer series and flashing back to 2021, which I believe to be the year we're actually mad at. I think this is where we all jumped the shark. We think it's 2020, but as we talked about in 2020, it's not 2020, it's 2021. So we're going to get into that today.

Beth [00:00:39] 2020 laid the poison seeds that bloomed in 2021.

Sarah [00:00:44] Yeah, that's it. That's what happened.

Beth [00:00:47] Well, before we have this delightful journey back in time.

Sarah [00:00:51] You know what I told someone? I said on Substack, I said, "I don't know how to explain it to you that this is both painful and fun."

Beth [00:00:59] That's our whole business, Sarah. That's what Pantsuit Politics is.

Sarah [00:01:03] I don't know how to explain to you that this flashback series is both painful and fun.

Beth [00:01:13] Well, isn't it maturity about being able to handle all the things together at one time?

Sarah [00:01:19] Sure. If maturity means laughing and cussing more in the face of all this.

Beth [00:01:25] You use the tools available to you.

Sarah [00:01:27] I am getting very mature.

Beth [00:01:30] Well, speaking of laughing and perhaps swearing and having a good time, this is the last chance to get tickets to our live show, which is happening tomorrow. It's finally here. We're so excited. So if you would like to jump in to the virtual ticket pool, we would love to have you there. It's going to be so much fun. There will be chances for you to participate as well. You can watch it from the comfort of your home and at your convenience. That link will be in the notes for you. We are so looking forward to seeing so many of your faces and hugging so many necks in Cincinnati tomorrow.

Sarah [00:02:07] All right, next up, 2021. Well, we started off nice and easy in 2021 with January 6th. Nice and easy.

Beth [00:02:32] Just a real on-ramp to the year. We broke all our New Year's resolutions early. I guess it's what you do. Just rip the Band-Aid.

Sarah [00:02:42] And I really kind of feel like maybe we were over the anthropomorphizing years by 2021. I feel like we were like, okay, we're not going to do that anymore. But this bitch deserved it January 6th? You couldn't let us get a whole week into the year before you threw something like this at us?

Beth [00:03:05] We talked about how George Floyd's murder in 2020 was one of the clearest things that has happened during the life of our podcast. I still feel that way about January 6th too.

Sarah [00:03:18] Agreed.

Beth [00:03:19] Not here at all for the revisionism. I watched it with my eyes. I talked to my friend Tracy on the phone while it was happening. I was narrating it with another human being and absolutely nothing that has happened or been written or been told since has changed my mind about what went down that day.

Sarah [00:03:40] And, listen, I don't think it's going to work. I don't think it's going to work. As a student of history myself, Godspeed. It just doesn't really work that well. Hell, we spent a lot of time in 2020 and 2021 bemoaning the lost cause and how they came at-- but it didn't work. Nobody sits around going, man, that's not what the Civil War was about. Like they do, and there will always be people, a small percentage of people, just like since World War II have been a small of percentage of Holocaust deniers.

Beth [00:04:19] Flat earthers [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:04:20] Like you don't get to 100 and also those people never become the majority either. I'm not worried in any real way about 50 years from now, January 6th people being seen as patriots. Listen, I got a lot wrong. I'm prepared to get a lot more wrong. I hope I'm not wrong about this, but that's not usually how history shakes out.

Beth [00:04:53] Especially because quite a few of the people who were actually there that day are like, I'm sorry; that was bad.

Sarah [00:05:01] That was bad. I shouldn't have done that. But also the Proud Boys are suing the government. So we're not done. We're going to be brushing our hands off and being like we did it, we convinced everybody again ever, which is a bummer that I acknowledge. But I think most Americans know what they saw. And I wish that that had more impact on their long-term opinion of Donald Trump. I really do. But it doesn't, and I have to make my peace with that.

Beth [00:05:37] I just want to acknowledge places where in what everyone calls the post-truth world, I don't feel that. I feel that there is truth and clarity. As for me and my house, we saw what we saw on January 6th.

Sarah [00:05:47] Word. That's exactly right. But it was weird, too. I think in that moment, the disjointed experience was real immediately. And honestly I think it was worse than 9/11. Because in 9/11 if you didn't live in one of the areas directly affected, the fallout of the military action felt real. Not as real as like World War II or Vietnam but still felt real. This was just so far removed from a lot of people's everyday life, including mine, even though we did the hearings and we did the thing and I paid attention. It still didn't affect my day-to-day life in the same way something like COVID-19 did.

Beth [00:06:40] I think there were just different levels of loss with this event. For people in Washington DC, absolutely affected their everyday life. For all of us who pay attention to news and politics, something was lost that day, something real was lost. Even for people who don't pay attention, something was lost, but it's like way out in the spectrum of what you perceive as important in your life. And I think we are living the consequences of this still because every time anyone questions the legitimacy of an election that was long ago certified, we are revisiting this event and these risks. We have to decide elections and be done with them and move forward. We have to. Our whole model falls apart if we can't do that. And that's what I think was so awful about this day and that we'll always carry forward and that what we allowed to roll forward by electing Trump again. And watching as he filled his close advisor positions with people who continue to want to litigate the 2020 election.

Sarah [00:07:49] Well, and I don't know how history will play out the mass pardon for this. That's the part where I get a little bit like, hmm, I wonder what's going to happen there. I wonder how that will be seen. I wonder how that will affect how January 6th is seen. That's a piece of the puzzle I'm not quite sure about. And I want the impact of this to be one sided. I want to say, well, yeah, no, they question unless it's MAGA, but that's not true. There are people right now who are questioning the results of 2024 on the left. So it's spreading.

Beth [00:08:36] And I think they are wrong to do that. Let me say that as plainly as I possibly can. We have to be done with elections and move forward and agree on the result even when we don't like it. And that's kind of where I am, I've been, and am with the pardons. I think what people did on January 6th was wrong. I think it was an incredibly damaging act to our country. I think there's culpability all around in different tiers. I also think it is wrong for the person who I believe bears the greatest responsibility for January 6th to be elected president, while people who had much less culpability sit in jail. And so I just view the pardons as a piece of an unfortunate series of decisions that the United States populace made. And it is a series of decision that I just have to live with. I can't fight every day for the rest of my life.

Sarah [00:09:36] I just feel like when I look at this list of news stories beyond COVID-19, which of course we'll get to, but January 6th, the U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan, even a lot of the extreme weather events, it feels like in a way that we were veering away from what I understood the political reality and the political rules to be; we officially took a hard turn and left a lot of what I understand to be true about American politics fully behind. In ways I'm still trying to like understand. I'm still trying to figure out the new rules of the road. Because this feels like when we fully exited and we went on a new highway.

Beth [00:10:33] I remember us talking lots of times during this year about how the pandemic will change everything and should change everything. I think what I would like to go back and say to 2021 Beth who was saying that is it's really unpleasant to change everything without having a new thing locked and loaded and ready to go. And that's what happened, right? We abandoned a lot without having a clear vision of what we wanted next, and developing what little vision we had through the prism of just pure exhaustion with ourselves and everybody else. So we were not in our most creative space at a time when we really did need to be creating new things. And I think that's why the past few years have felt so depressing in America.

Sarah [00:11:30] Well, I don't think it's just in America.

Beth [00:11:32] Yeah. I don't want to smear other people with my own view, but that's what I see.

Sarah [00:11:37] Well, listen, I can't stop thinking about this double date we went on in Paris with these two Parisian journalists. And I just thought, oh, everybody's mad everywhere. Good to know. I feel a lot less lonely now. I just think that the problem with modern life is that our evolutionary fight or flight reaction is particularly ill-suited. We don't need a physical reaction or run from a saber-toothed tiger. We need to really lock in our prefrontal cortex, which just goes completely offline. And banded that play out in Six Ways to Sunday in 2021. Which we talked about last week. I feel like when I looked back over a lot of this, I thought this was 2020. The memories of 2021 aren't 2020. I kind of put a lot of this with the pandemic, but this wasn't when we were processing masks or vaccine or schools. All this was really during 2021, which I'm still trying to make sense of.

Beth [00:13:04] And I think that's important because it is very popular in democratic circles for people to be angry about any COVID fury being placed at the feet of President Biden. It's really significant to me to look back and realize that so much of my COVID experience that has seared into my memory as very, very hard happened once he was in office. I get how the theory goes. That again it was the mismanagement of 2020 that made 2021 so difficult. I agree with that. I think that's absolutely true. It is also true though that a lot of people who have a better sense of time than I apparently have, and who liked Donald Trump, remember a lot this as part and parcel of Biden's presidency.

Sarah [00:13:58] Let's talk about that up next. The thing I knew I got really wrong, and I think probably if you made me sit down and make a timeline, I knew it was 2021, which was the vaccines. I was so defensive of the vaccines and I thought you weren't going to be able to get COVID. I thought it was outrageous to think that you could get COVID after being vaccinated. I don't know why, guys. I did not go to medical school. I didn't even major in a science. I'm not really even sure I took any science classes in college. I guess I did. I think I was required to, but I don't remember them. And so why I was so confident in my take on this new technology is bananas. I think I just wanted it to be true.

Beth [00:14:54] I think you're being a little hard on yourself. We grew up at a moment in time when a lot of public health work had blossomed in a really productive way. We were told with lots of things, get this vaccine. You won't get it and nobody else will either because it's basically gone. We did it, we eliminated it.

Sarah [00:15:16] That's true.

Beth [00:15:17] And that is not the world our children are growing up in. As to some of the same things that we've had vaccines for this whole time because people's attitudes have changed so significantly. But that was what I believed a vaccine meant because everything in my life experience had told me that's what a vaccine meant. I did not understand being at the beginning of something new.

Sarah [00:15:38] Well, since I've beat up on myself, I will also give myself some props. Because as I was listening back, in my head, I think the story I tell myself is I was fully in it with the shaming people who didn't follow science and being mad at people who didn't wear masks and being on a certain side of the school closure debate. And as I went back and listened, I was like, oh, you weren't. As early as May, 2021, I was saying, "Let's talk about how we can assess risk, how we really can depend on the science instead of politicizing it, because both sides in this debate have politicized science, period." Both sides have rejected science that they didn't feel like met their goals. And if you cannot see that about your own side, we need to have a conversation. Blue states, progressive communities, we're wrong. I'm going to say this as clearly as I can, not because I am mad at anybody who chose this, not because I can't see how we got there, but now on the other side we can do some Monday morning quarterbacking and see that the risk for shutting down school exceeded the risk of spread or infection from COVID with our kids.

[00:17:00] And I think the longer we deny that the worse it is. We need to own where we politicize the science. And we decided that the science told us one thing, but it agreed with Donald Trump and that wasn't good enough for us. And I saw this in conversation and conversation and conversation. We had a lot of conversations where I was hard on blue states and left wing politics for being like this is not right. The way we're going about this and shaming people and trying to control people through this moralizing is going to blow up in our face. And I feel like I was right about that.

Beth [00:17:40] I think I wonder then what you take from that. If tomorrow we wake up and there is a novel something, and we have to take a beat and figure out what that something is and how to protect people against it. What do we learn from this period and do really differently?

Sarah [00:18:03] I wrote down in my notes like I kept saying during these shows I wasn't mad, but I probably was. It's just so emotional. And I don't know if we put some process or learning in place where we escape the emotions of something like this next time. With regards to 2020, the politicization that Donald Trump, that path he took, and it was very distinctive when he took it, there was another option available to us that I think could have taken us somewhere different. And I think again just like I said in that clip, there was politicization on both sides. So I will love if we wouldn't do that, but I think that's probably naive for myself. Were we to go through something like this again, I guess I would just wake up every morning and give myself a little pep talk like you don't have to prove that you're a good person through the choices you make in this incredibly difficult situation.

[00:19:09] Because that's what I hear when I listen to those episodes. Me just trying to prove over and over again that I was a good and that I cared and that was doing the right thing because I'm a good and I care. And I care because I am a good and I'm doing the right things because I care. It's like the heartbeat underneath everything I'm saying. I'm always just, again, trying so hard, so much try hard during these years to prove that care about the right things and I'm listening to the right scientists and I making the right calls in my life because I'm to the right scientist because I am a person who cares in the world. I'm not a cruel person. I'm a good person. And I can just hear that drum beat.

Beth [00:19:49] I think what I will take forward is remembering that if you're at the beginning of something, everything that follows is an experiment. Everything is. And so, yes, the guidance might change because they might learn something new. And the initial attempts to contain might not work. And everything is going to take longer than anybody wishes it would take. And absolutely everything is just about risks and benefits and you've got to give people some space to make their own calls. I've been thinking about this in a lot of public health and just a lot of policy in general. How can we do a better job informing people? Here are the stakes associated with this for most people, the average experience, and we're a very big country, so there are going to be a lot of things on either side of the average experienced. But this is what we think the average experience looks like with path A, path B, and path C. You should know that, factor it in, go forth and do your best.

[00:20:53] I completely understand from the perspective of public health professionals why that is an infuriating thing to hear because so much of what really works in public health is collective action and almost unanimous collective action. I just don't know if we can handle it. This is a weird corollary, but a thing I think I've changed my mind about over the past couple of years is ranked choice voting. I think it's an excellent system. I think it makes so much more sense than what we do now. And I think what we've demonstrated over the last couple of year is we can't handle it. We're not up for the waiting that requires, and the subtlety involved and the calculations, even though they're not that hard, we're just not. Like the trust is too low right now. And I think some of what has caused a lot of frustration is that there's a segment of society trying to do democracy 3.0 and the need of society is to hold 1.0 together. And I wonder if that happened here. That we were just going for a better batting average than we were capable of as a public. And so I think what I take from this is like the batting averages is going to be lower than you want, Beth. And that's okay because people assess this through a lot of different prisms.

Sarah [00:22:23] I do feel good that very early in the conversation we named that this was about risk assessment. Even I think into 2020, we were like this is just about risk assessments and people are really mad at that.

Beth [00:22:35] People including us, right? Like that's not from sitting on high looking down. All of us are wired to be bad at risk assessment.

Sarah [00:22:45] I think that an objective reality is there is an aspect of an educational experience, particularly, college and law school that trains you in critical thinking and risk assessment. Doesn't mean you never make mistakes, but I think that's how you get to believing that people can reach the higher batting average than they can is because you can. And I also think some of it is about risk assessment, and then there's this other big piece of it that is just about control. And when the situation is so dramatically out of your control, people want to control what they can, what they think they can. Which is each other. And I don't know if there's a way out of that. I don't know if there's a way when the stakes are high that you don't get people furious that others aren't trying as hard as they are. I just think that there's some real basic human psychology going on there. And we tell stories about like World War II, but they would also fight and they got mad.

[00:24:02] I can't wait to watch Outrageous, the new thing on the Mitford sisters. If you don't know who the Mitford sisters are, they are a rich text. They're this set of British sisters. There's seven of them. One of them was a communist. One of them was a crazy Nazi and like the most hated woman in Britain because she thought Nazis were the future. You see what I'm saying? It's not as simple as we think it was. It's not like everybody just got on board and they never disagreed again. It doesn't matter. I'm sure if anybody who's spending time to like Ukraine right now could tell you about the fights they're having because I guarantee you they're having some. I've read about some of them. So it's like that's part of it, too. It's like we're going to try to control each other, we're going to fight about things. It doesn't matter how high the stakes are. We're not always going to agree.

Beth [00:24:47] And I would add to this reckoning with human behavior. Well, I don't believe that anyone wants mass death across the globe. There are people who view the statement, 'a lot of people will die' quite differently than I do. And it cannot be that all of those people are horrible. You remember like weeks ago when Joni Ernst was confronted by a protestor who said people are going to die with this Big Beautiful Bill? And she responded, well, everybody's going to die. That didn't come out of nowhere. It was a terrible response to be clear, politically and substantively terrible. But there are a lot of people who have a higher level of acceptance that, yeah, life is hard and terrible and cruel. And I think that what we learned in part from 2021 is you don't win any arguments by trying to talk people out of that fundamental orientation to the universe. Again, I don't know exactly what that means because I do want to say to people that everybody doesn't have to die this way and right now, and we have ways to prevent suffering. Don't we want to prevent as much suffering as possible? But I did really get in this period and everything that's happened since just a deeper understanding that people will die is just not a persuasive political argument.

Sarah [00:26:38] Yeah, because it's super reductive. Because it's telling there's like a lot tied up in that. 2021 is when I-- maybe it was sooner than that, but it definitely felt like where I was just fully done with the like I can't convince you to care. I just was done. I can't do this anymore. I can't do the everybody accelerate to the point where you want kids to die, and that's how you prove your point. The other side wants kids to die. Like it's just at the center point of so many really stupid political fights we have in America. Nobody wants kids to die. I understand we have real debates around real issues like abortion and the death penalty and COVID where life is on the line. But the presence of true sociopaths who do not care about death or the suffering of their fellow human beings is very small inside the population, okay? And it's just not a persuasive argument. Even if it's true, even if you have actually stumbled upon one of those sociopaths, this is not persuasive. The undercurrent of that is basically what's wrong with you.

[00:27:58] That's what you're saying. People will die. What's wrong with you? I haven't talked about this on the show, but I read, How Do You Sleep at Night? It's a really good novel. The premise is that there's a brother and a sister. The sister's the reporter, the brother is gay, married to a basically like MAGA Republican, like a gay MAGA guy who's going to run for office. And the author, she is scratching at some stuff. Good stuff. She made it hard, which I respect, to like pick a side. Because it's hard. It's not as simple as what's wrong with you? How do you sleep at night? Never is. And the people particularly on the ground in it with family members trying to sort this out, they can tell you that. I can tell that with my dad. Having fights with him about vaccines and all this stuff. And when he got COVID, I had to have him text me his pull socks every like 30 freaking minutes. It was so complicated. And so when you try to make it simple, it just doesn't land. It doesn't work. And I'm interested in things that work, not interested in thing that just make us feel better.

Beth [00:29:38] And in that vein, you look back and this was a period of real disconnection over politics and COVID for people. Because you couldn't avoid it, right? It became like who's coming to the wedding. We can't have a funeral. Like there are just so many places where this hit so hard, so personally, around rituals that really help us make sense of the world and our place in it.

Sarah [00:30:12] Oh my God, graduations, when people had to go into the hospital and have a baby, it was wild. It was wild out there.

Beth [00:30:19] So, so hard. Of course, we weren't our best selves. Of course, we handled things poorly in certain instances. Of course, relationships got broken because this time just hurt so badly. And I think a long tale of the political scene from 2021 is a belief that democratic politics break relationships. I think this time has provided a lot of fodder for the idea that Democrats do not value families or communities. And I think Democrats take from this time that Republicans don't care about people with severe illnesses, people with compromised immune systems. I think both parties have taken a long-term you don't-care-about-something-that's-important-to-me message from this that is really, really damaging.

Sarah [00:31:28] Yeah, and look, that's so tough too, because we get as many emails from people saying, my MAGA relatives have cut me off.

Beth [00:31:39] Yes, we do. Absolutely.

Sarah [00:31:39] It's not like it's one side owns the corner on this market, because they don't. The idea of I just can't with you anymore. I read a Substack about somebody who like it wasn't even through the lens of party. It was just like the level at which these two people made choices around COVID got to the point where it ended the friendship. And I just thought, oh man. I think there's something about all these choices inside those rituals, inside our communities that we're not built for. I mean, a kabillion years ago, or even 1000 years ago, or even to get solid 100 years ago your people were your people. You don't have a choice. You weren't moving, neither were they. You were stuck with them. And that's how we evolved. And we certainly don't have the language, the art, the rituals, the processes to discuss what it means when you can choose. And I think COVID really put that on full display. That we're just not-- I'm not sure we're up for it.

Beth [00:33:11] Well, and we were asked to choose so many things at a time when we just were not at our best. This time felt to me much like the time right after I gave birth, when I was as tired as I had ever been. When you're three months in and you haven't slept through the night once. That's kind of how disoriented I felt during 2021. And so to be making all those choices with all this new information, all this stuff that nothing in my life experience has prepared me for, in fact, a lot that runs counter to everything that my life experiences prepared me for, of course I screwed up. Of course, we all did.

Sarah [00:33:58] And I think, for me, I can't decide what this did to my perception of time, but we spent a lot of time talking in 2020 about how we still had fun and we still made memories. And by 2021, we were traveling, probably a little bit ahead of most people. We were still careful. We still had to wear masks a lot of places. But hell we went to Disney in October of 2020. And I think that really detached the timeline for me in this weird way. You know what I mean? It's not like I felt like everything was normal. I didn't. Our school was so closed on and off all the way through at least spring, 2021. But I think being out in the world and leaving this place that we had experienced so much of COVID... Like at the same time, I'm in the internet space where everybody's like basically still really in 2020. It was like you know what I mean? Like in my real life I was like living in 2022, but here on the show we were still processing like everything from 2020. I was splintering in some sort of like weird Marvel universe timeline kind of way.

Beth [00:35:46] And it just was like that. It just was splintered like that. The episode that stuck out to me when I went back to this year was our episode on the supply chain, which was in October of 2021. And in October 2021, we were asking if there would be turkeys for Thanksgiving. We were seeing empty rows of paper towels on the shelves at Target in October of 2021. And so I think that that's helped me put together why people blame this on the Biden administration. Because I think what they heard in the election is we will fix it. And it wasn't fixed immediately. Now, could it have been? Probably not. I think overall the Biden Administration did a pretty decent job handling a mess. And there was no good way. And there were always going to be things that were lost and trade-offs in terms of what you pursue and what you let go and the opportunity cost of everything. But it helps me enormously to understand people's frustration about the economy in particular to realize that in October of 2021, you and I were talking about how the supply chain was fucked. That was the name of our episode.

Sarah [00:36:58] We also have labor shortages along other parts of the retail process where people can't find workers in restaurants and grocery stores. We talked about this on the show that this is in part because of all but complete halting of immigration during the Trump administration. So there's a shortage of immigrant workers. There's the relief from poverty as a motivator to take these low-income jobs provided by the federal government during COVID. Again, this is just one more step in the process that was running with no margin where it needed margin basically.

Beth [00:37:41] And these are hard jobs. The people who are out on ships, who've had to stay out much longer than scheduled during COVID, that's a hard job. Working the floor at Walmart or in an Amazon plant, that's a hard job, and I think that some of what COVID has asked of everyone is how do you want to be spending your time? And many of these jobs are not just physically demanding and long and with hours that no one wants to work. They are also dangerous. Even as technology has made so much of this more efficient, there is an element of danger that accompanies much of this work. So because of all these factors converging, we are seeing undeniably some inflation.

Sarah [00:38:33] And I think what the travel really did for me, it's like we just say COVID we asked that to do a lot of work. To what? Encompass the experience of someone in Manhattan and also someone in Tallahassee, someone in Utah? Those experiences were so dramatically different. And I think when we started to move around and see like, oh, okay, so what we experienced was so dramatically different. I mean, we went to New York City for Christmas in 2021. And I remember seeing the pop-up testing sites and how much direction just like where people should stand and all this stuff. And it was really wild. And there were so many, when I look back on it, indicators. Like you would go to Disney there was a hyper enforcement of the rules. Like, if you pulled your mask down to take a drink of water, they were like, you need to stand in this space. In the midst of Florida. So then you'd leave Disney and you'd like go to a restaurant in like Orlando--

Beth [00:40:05] People are just living their lives.

Sarah [00:40:07] And it's like COVID never happened. So it was just like it's wild out there. And that was good to see. It was just really good to see and realize something traumatic can and should shrink your geography down so dramatically. Like you're just protecting what you can, you're controlling what you can, you're perceiving just what you and realizing, oh, okay, this is why it does feel like we live in different realities because in a lot of ways we do.

Beth [00:40:51] And I think about long COVID, how my mom made it through. I was very worried that she would not make it through COVID and she did, but she's never been the same. And I that so many things have long COVID. I think the supply chain had long COVID. It was a long, long time before there was any level of stability. I think very recently we achieved some level of stability and then the threat of terrorists took that away again. But a lot of relationships, churches have long COVID, for sure. A lot of people stopped coming and just haven't come back. And that has changed everything for those churches. Mine is one of them. I think the Biden administration kind of got long COVID. I think this year and how difficult it was and how disjointed it was and how the policies could not immediately get to the things that were just real pain points in people's lives and people's businesses and schools and all the things, I just think there was no recovering from it.

Sarah [00:41:58] Well, schools. And look, I don't have long COVID in that I still suffer symptoms. And I'm not trying to put on my amateur virologist hat again because it was not a good fit for me. But look, pretty much everybody's had COVID at this point. And it changes you just like a flu will change you. We don't understand the body enough to understand the impact of viruses. I mean, what was I reading the other day that there was like a long-term-- it was like Huntington's or Parkinson's or Alzheimer's and they're like, well, we think maybe it was just this virus that some people get that just never leaves. We can't fool ourselves and say there is no tale of this even physically in our own cells, much less inside our culture.

Beth [00:43:04] Yeah.

Sarah [00:43:04] Well, let's talk about culture up next. So we said last week that we started to see the red flags through the way that culture was atomizing in a way that I think we're just now trying to figure out. We're just still seeing the for real impact of. Well, this is when I think the lights started flashing red. Even though we did have so many shared experiences culturally that really bubbled up, I can't believe 2021 was Oprah's interview with Harry and Meghan. It feels like last year. Why does it feel like it was not that long ago? It was so long ago.

Beth [00:44:02] I wonder if it's because that situation just doesn't feel like it has any resolution.

Sarah [00:44:09] Yeah, I think because it defined them so definitively. And so if you hear about them, you think about that situation. So it's sort of ever-present.

Beth [00:44:18] Yes. And they want to be ever-present in the cultural consciousness and so it just hangs around.

Sarah [00:44:26] There's a lot of things that I looked back and thought, wait, that was in 2021? Like, Free Britney feels more recent than in fact it is. That's when the conservatorship of her was finally ended after 13 years.

Beth [00:44:39] I don't really have a good perception of time around that, and I also still do not know how I feel about any of it other than sad that she has been through everything she's been through.

Sarah [00:44:50] There were so much like for lack of a better word, throwback. So we're talking about Brittny. We're talking about Bennifer, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got back together. And I think for a moment put us back on the right timeline. Then they broke up and here we are. I'm just saying.

Beth [00:45:10] You think they belong together cosmically?

Sarah [00:45:13] For the good of the rest of us, I do. I think they should take one for the team. Taylor Swift's re-recording. She starts doing the Taylor's version. Marvel comes back. There's just a lot of like-- even Megan and Harry, the royal family is, in a certain way, always a throwback. So there's just so much like visiting going on.

Beth [00:45:35] Which does make sense that you would go for nostalgia in a disrupted time.

Sarah [00:45:42] Yeah. Well, your choices were nostalgia or Squid Games?

Beth [00:45:45] Yeah, and I took nostalgia at that.

Sarah [00:45:47] I did not watch Squid Games. I think I watched one episode and I was like, got it. No, thank you.

Beth [00:45:52] I heard the premise and was out.

Sarah [00:45:54] Yeah, it was dark. Now, we got a fresh one. We got a fresh one with Olivia Rodrigo. Did love that album.

Beth [00:46:03] Sour was tremendous. So good.

Sarah [00:46:05] Just walked around listening to Driver's License. My son was like what's wrong with you? And I said, "When your heart breaks and all this music opens up to you, you'll understand." It's worth it. It's worth the heartbreak to be able to listen to Driver's License.

Beth [00:46:20] You know what we should do for just the good of humanity with this episode? We should link the clip from SNL when Regé-Jean Page hosted the very, very attractive man from Bridgerton. Remember him?

Sarah [00:46:31] Yeah, I didn't watch Bridgerton. When was Bridgerton? What year was that?

Beth [00:46:34] It's got to be about the same time when it was really taking off.

Sarah [00:46:38] You don't watch Bridgerton, do you?

Beth [00:46:39] No.

Sarah [00:46:41] I don't either. But I do love that man because he's in Bad Sisters. 2020! We missed that last week. Missed that one. Bridgerton.

Beth [00:46:48] So he's hosting SNL and they do Driver's License and he's singing with a group of people in a bar to Driver's Licensed and Kate McKinnon is like, “Everybody get ready for the bridge of your life.” It was so, so funny.

Sarah [00:47:06] Yeah, that was a good one. That was a Good one. Well, and I think culturally, as I look over this list too, there were some fights bubbling around the re-opening and people were going back to concerts and Broadway was opening back up. So that sensitivity was everywhere, even culturally. Same to what we were talking about last week. Like everything had to have a purpose and a message. I like driver's license, but I don't look back on this list and think what a contributive year to art. You know what I mean? Listen, I'm sure there were incredibly important artistic contributions, but I think the throwback energy is probably the predominant one.

Beth [00:47:55] What makes me feel most hopeful here is that we did get back to the movie theater. This year looked like the movie theaters could be over. It really did. And people are coming back out and we're realizing that it's really, really fun.

Sarah [00:48:14] And everybody just said if Bennifer can make a go of it, so can we.

Beth [00:48:18] That's right. And honestly, I think the movie theater stands out as like a beacon of hope to me because it is expensive to go to movies, but it is not like going to a concert. Concerts were covered, but only certain kinds of concerts really. It's very, very hard to make money on a small concert now. So it's like blockbuster ticket sales go crazy or you're floating a balloon and then having to cancel the concert before the run because it's not going to work economically. The movies I feel like we have in big enough numbers tried to come out and say this is a valuable experience that we want to keep.

Sarah [00:48:56] Well, I do think in 2021 if we weren't trying, we were still thinking about valuable experiences we wanted back. That's for sure. And listen, that journey, that conversation is not over. Next up, we'll talk about 2022 next week. We will be back in your ears on Tuesday with the latest in the headlines and the news. So until then, keep it nuanced y'all.