I don’t know why this just occurred to me since the writing has been on the wall about this for some time, but I realized we are getting a real time lesson in what not governing will do to a population’s health and how underestimating that will be the end of America, our health maybe not replenished until next century if that. Suddenly you see what giving people the ability to opt in or opt out of society at will will do, it will leave more of us sick, and many lamenting later they wish they got the vaccine to avoid the suffering now and/or later. We have government in place to guide us and help protect the population from each other–suddenly every person I’ve ever spoken about lamenting regulation and government overreach because people can be trusted to do the right thing have been proven utterly brutally wrong about everything. Suddenly we realize counting on everyone else to do the right thing isn’t realistic. We see what leaving people to do what they “feel” is right regardless of the science, millions of orphans at the end of this, hospitals closed, healthcare workers sick of the abuse fleeing by the thousands to never come back to something some felt they had a calling for-the country utterly exhausted by the fight it will continue to have to endure for the next few decades because its refusal to cooperate during its snotty selfish years did that to all of us.
This has always been about more than individuals–we all participate and benefit from society’s resources, some more than others, but we all live here and depend on each other to live. Remember my analogy about the kid in the ER, how we’d never think to question someone asking us to inconvenience ourselves for someone’s sick kid-that suddenly when everyone was possibly the sick kid people decided their compassion and empathy ended then. It is absurd to me that everyone here hasn’t realized we have all each other to depend on because clearly the government sold us out to money and business–that we should all be uniting together to demand more, not let the rich people and their lack of empathy or even basic memory of struggle wash us away from their concern. They try to scare you with words like socialist–suddenly that word’s lost its power since we sit here all day reminding people of what socialism is in the US, some of us having traveled to countries that practice social democracy and have seen with our own eyes how much nicer things are for them–now they’ve moved to communist because that lost its scare factor.
Beyond the issues of people taking resources from people who eagerly paid that social contract price and who missed their beds for care or to find health problems that might kill them without intervention–there’s the cost to communities if people need to use hospitals for care for something they had a direct hand in avoiding. People have tried the well then we shouldn’t treat people in society who are obese or smokers—and it is certainly not the same. Consequences born of long-term bad behavior are a lot different than refusing to vaccinate or mask yourself against something we know will torpedo the nation’s health as well as close hospitals with a vengeance. People will need those hospitals more than we ever have before, and there won’t be any because we cannot be endless spigots of money for illness nobody can plan for at all. It is our once a century pandemic, and maybe nobody else got the history lesson I did, but this sucker came RIGHT ON TIME.
I swear, if people are stupid enough to vote in the party who did not give a fuck about them or their health or happiness into power–I want off. I don’t want to stay, F it, if I could win the lottery today I’d find a way to leave because I don’t trust people–it’s like nobody read books as kids and forgot how to empathize or give a shit about anyone but themselves and I am stuck seeing it in real time as a slow moving car crash I have been living in for decades and nobody wanted to listen a bit. The wakeup call is here, your team wants you dead–and they don’t care a bit about you or your family and its financial or physical wellness–they just get people buzzed up by trigger words they know people can form a tribal line behind. It is sad, predictable and completely avoidable. Hey if nothing else, you might want to run the fuck out of here if you have a bad health illness from COVID, most of the resources in other countries are far cheaper and invested in far more prevention than this one is–they give a shit about their communities, they trust their government, they already pitched their fits and got a better democracies for themselves out of it–we in the meantime spend all of our time pointing out our differences instead of realizing most of us want the same basic things–they’ve actually tricked people into voting against having basic things, basic resources we all value because socialism or communism. What an absurd thing they’ve been able to do, exploiting people’s fear of what they don’t know to maintain power. It’s like we all want magic fingers to snap everyone out of it and make people realize rich people watch out for rich people and we need to expect more.
Here’s one article that inspired this one:
How a Virus Exposed the Myth of Rugged Individualism