The key lesson to take from Fauci's emails

There is a valuable lesson in Dr. Anthony Fauci's just-released emails, and it has nothing to do with COVID-19. It involves two particular aspects of written communication, especially today.

In separate releases this week, the online news website BuzzFeed and The Washington Post published more than 3,200 pages of emails written to and by Fauci between January and June of 2020. The agencies acquired the documents through the Freedom of Information Act, and their early stories have painted a picture of Fauci as a tireless leader in the struggle to understand the coronavirus and communicate accurate information about its characteristics and risks. Political partisans already are stamping this huge body of documents with their own interpretations, so the emails will likely be the source of much commentary and reflection in the days ahead.

Which leads to an important observation that by now ought to be fixed in the consciousness of anyone who uses electronic communication. It's not only on social media that you should beware of what you say and how you say it. It's also in what you think may be the private world of your personal and especially your business email.

That world is far from private, as public figures from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton have learned to their great chagrin.

And, what you write today lives forever, waiting somewhere in a fat, dark cybercloud to emerge and soak you with embarrassment, or worse, whenever it suits someone's purposes.

Whatever context you may think justifies your foul language, your complaints about your workplace, your boss or your coworkers, your petty criticisms of someone else's appearance or your offensive outbursts, this likely will not be part of the picture others see. It will only be the stark, embarrassing words you wrote in haste or rage.

So, the early releases from Fauci's correspondence seem to offer an important lesson in how to live in this new world.

"The emails do give a sense of the type of communicator Fauci is: courteous, low-key, and empathetic," says a BuzzFeed report. "He politely interacts with the office assistants who help him with his correspondence, and he sweats over the proper way to let people down ... And when health professionals write him with harsh criticism of Trump's handling of the pandemic, he doesn't take the bait."

He also, however, can be direct, but even then, his tone is respectful and polite. When a prominent epidemiologist wrote him to complain the country was not getting "vocally, unequivocal leadership now, that offers real guidance to communities about what to do, what might happen next," he responded forcefully.

"I genuflect to no one but science," he wrote, "and always, always speak my mind when it comes to public health. I have consistently corrected misstatements by others and will continue to do so."

In the hundreds of thousands of words collected in Fauci's emails, no doubt partisans of all stripes will find plenty of points to justify their views of how leaders handled the coronavirus epidemic. Two things we all should remember, though, have nothing to do with political issues. In short, private emails are not private, and civil written conversations are both the most persuasive and the safest. If we all keep these thoughts in mind, our written communications will surely be more constructive.

jslusher@dailyherald.com