Quarantine’s rough on everyone. Jobs are lost, people are getting the jitters staying at home, and mental health is even harder to maintain when you’re locked up inside than it was before. But Social Distancing seems to be working to slow the spread, even if it’s not nearly enough for some health care services around the world.
It’s sometimes difficult to imagine how things could get worse. Unless you’re living in the Fragmented States of America. Then, over the weekend, it got real easy to imagine how things could get worse, as the most belligerent parts of the nation brought guns to a epidemiological fight.
All across the US, people took to their cars and their MAGA shirts and hats to close down their cities and towns in an effort to protest and threaten their leaders to cease the shut-down in effect. Some even brought their obscene automatic rifles on display on the steps of civic buildings, chanting that not even a global pandemic and international health crisis would stand in the way of their corn-syrup-soaked privileges. In Denver, Colorado, it even went so far that the already beleaguered health worker professionals had to leave their posts to perform a silent counter-protest; blocking the Trump-fanatics in their rage-filled, slow-moving cavalcades.
Nurses and doctors who labour day and night to stem the tide had to go on strike to take a stand against the most putrid people of the Republic. That is absolutely staggering.
“Give me Liberty or give me Covid-19”, one plaque in Olympia, Washington, said. “Freedom or Death”, another one cried.
Okay then. Sure. These bible-humping, Trump-totting, ignoble ignoramuses can have it. It is just a shame that the Wuhan Virus isn’t lethal enough to plausibly make a dent in their numbers. Or discriminating enough to target these gaps in the gene pool. If people want to make themselves a part of the problem, then let them. I’m liberal enough to see the philosophical virtue in letting people put themselves at whatever risk they want. You can’t force people to not become part of the problem. All you can do in such circumstance is to also treat them as part of the problem…
Deny people health care if they won’t follow quarantine protocol. The US has already proven that it has no inherent problem with letting people die on the doorsteps of hospitals, and that its health care administrations are woefully unprepared to meet this challenge. I am sure that the insurance industry would just absolutely love to void a whole lot of flimsy insurance claims because the claimants have disobeyed the stay-home ordinances of many states. Cordon these cretin off from all the horrified masses that prefer not to subject their health services to back-breaking pressure. With any luck, the stress of having broken their contract with their government will send these profanely armed death-cultists and Rapture-chanters into a mindless frenzy and kill each other off.
You think I’m being too harsh? What we have here is a sizeable minority of the population that have turned ignorance and indignant rage into a revered virtue. Galvanized by a criminal and unconscionable president. These creatures are a threat to every single other being that comes close to them. As if their evangelical fanaticism wasn’t bad enough. As if their armaments and love for The Gun wasn’t bad enough. As if their rage and stupidity weren’t bad enough. Now they are on the verge of taking up arms against their elected leaders just because they want to make themselves carriers of a potentially lethal, nation-breaking virus…
Is it really I who am too harsh when I think that a vast majority of the US population would be better off without them? Am I the one being too harsh when I think the world would be better off without them? I am humanist and liberal enough to see the ethical problem of just smothering them like the political wild-fires that they are, but here we have a circumstance where they want to expose themselves and their loved ones to a decimation. To me, it seems like a problem that comes with its own solution.
Sure, the virus isn’t all that lethal. But its lethality increases with obesity, nicotine use, underlying health concerns, and when official health guidelines get ignored. Maybe Lady Luck and her a-romantic companion Statistical Probability would be on our side this time.
Of course, we would never be that lucky. No excommunication is going to happen. If they have to, I bet Jared Kushner and the Orange House would even use their “own federal medical reserves” to save a good portion of their precious base. No, with so many military grade guns in so many belligerent and angry hands, with white supremacist support from an orange despot and his converted political establishment, with a soft-core plague running rampant and supply shortages abound, with overworked government staff and idle hands among an insanely armed population, odds are instead high of insurrection. Civil war. Just like what the Orange Hydra has insinuated calls for from his ivory throne. Just like all the great Empires of Earth’s days passed, so do the Discordant States of America seem to be fated. In fire and blood, and not a clean sweep.
Either way, all us international onlookers can do is to by proxy experience all the shame that the ruling minority of the US seem completely alien to feel on their own, and to keep face-palming our way through the new millennium.
/Sebastian Lindberg 20/4-2020
WastedWords 