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This Virus Is Still Really Bad

 I checked the COVID cases and deaths this morning. Over 2,200 people already, dead. I hear people saying that we're overreacting, that somehow, we're "living in fear." I just have to suppose that some folks cannot handle "9-11" nearly every day. What mental gymnastics do you have to do, to persuade yourself that it's "no big deal"?

I've had 3 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, so I'm not overly concerned about being harmed personally. What I did, I did partly for others. I've lost a lot of friends and loved ones in this life, and suddenly. Death comes for us; it is our fate in this world, we could say. I don't understand why we would want to bring it more quickly, and for no sensible reason.

A lot of my friends and family are just stubborn, gullible, or some combination of both, I guess. If that offends you, good. I'm over 40; if people's love for me is conditional at this point, I don't need them. We won't be here forever; we don't have time to lie to each other about important things, for the sake of politeness.

I have to assume that I've been among the especially vulnerable this entire time. I used to fancy myself ever and always just an individual, but I think about myself as part of the community of the severely disabled now. If friends and family of the vulnerable ask me to wear a mask to keep them safe, no problem. If they don't want to associate in person with the unvaccinated, I get it.

People will say that it's easy for me to "virtue signal" and hide in my house. Well, as long as I'm guilt-tripping people, you haven't made a society too easy for me and others to live in, anyway. A lot of people have been bound by the selfishness of others our entire lives. One doesn't realize how much anger one has about this, until one tries to live normally, and meets the peculiar roadblocks of "otherness."

I have no mandates to impose, beyond my obvious disapproval of selfish and ignorant choices. Maybe people even know they're being foolish, because they compare something barely more onerous than the obligation to have car insurance to the most vicious tyrannies in human history.

Funny thing: We never seem to tell these melodramatic serial exaggerators to stop "living in fear."

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Timothy R. Butler said…
Amen and amen.
12:08 AM
Beth said…
So that IS the prize for reaching 40! I’ve always suspected that 40 would be better than 25 or 30, for some reason. Maybe it’s that whole bit about being more truthful and less polite. Great, I look forward to it. :)
9:34 PM
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