"REPUBLICANS DYING AFTER REFUSING TO GET VACCINATED AGAINST COVID-19 IS WHY KAMALA HARRIS WILL NEVER BE PRESIDENT" - Politico/The Hill
I have too much time this week, hence why you're getting these letters in quick succession.
(Also, writing also distracts me from the fact that I currently want to yell and slam doors and throw things but my parents sent me to etiquette lessons, where I learned that ladies don’t do those things. We also don’t open doors for ourselves when men are in the vicinity, go out in public with dark circles under our eyes, or eat more than 1400 calories a day. But I digress.)
Of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about the politicization of COVID-19. For reasons both personal and political, I’m very bitter that the virus got as bad as it did, and I put the onus for that on Donald Trump and his GOP cronies. Trump fired the Obama White House’s pandemic support team, he derided Joe Biden and Democrats for advocating mask wearing when there was a deadly respiratory virus floating around, he refused to shut down schools and businesses for the sake of the economy (I can’t wait for Ron DeSantis’ death count to be come out but that man’s still winning re-election next year), and as a result of Trump’s maleficence, 600,000+ Americans died.
But now, even after the COVID-19 vaccine has been proven to be effective and there’s a whole facet of the population who refuses to get vaccinated because they want to own the libs or something. Consequently, as the Delta variant spreads, it’s not us damn liberals who are dying in ICUs, not anymore. The overwhelming majority of the Delta variant’s victims are unvaccinated, and concentrated in deep-red states; and honestly, like the doctors who have to treat them, I’m finding it hard to muster up genuine sympathy for these people. I’m sure that some of them are genuinely victims of circumstance, but I wholly condemn their Republican leadership and legislatures, and yeah, I also condemn the people that voted them in. I voted for Jay Inslee and Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and none of them ever called COVID a hoax or perpetuated that bullshit!
People in Arkansas are refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine after they had every opportunity to do so and the state now has an excess of vaccines that are going bad, masks are banned in public schools, and a health official in Tennessee who encouraged vaccination in teens was fired. Moreover, even though Trump and his Republican Senate cronies (“the big bad man and his big bad clan/ their hands are stained with red”) got vaccinated months ago, that still hasn’t stopped him from yelling about how “the vaccine is as trustworthy as the 2020 election results” and them from refusing to push back against the ludicrousness. But, with the Delta variant causing the stock market to take a turn for the worse, Republican legislators like Mitch McConnell are begging Americans to take the vaccine after months of obfuscation in order to not alienate their base who came out for Trump in a way they didn’t for Mitt Romney or John McCain.
My cynical hypothesis is that the majority of Republicans were more or less fine with COVID-19 when the people dying of the virus were poor Black and brown people that were unable to work from home but now, with the majority of Americans who intend to get vaccinated already fully vaccinated (or well on the path to it) and the vaccines protecting against variants, the majority of people dying from the Delta variant are people whose votes McConnell and his cronies are reliant on to retain power. Their conundrum however, is that by catering to those people, they alienate rich suburbanites who historically vote Republican “for the tax cuts,” at least down ballot, want their kids back in school next month, and really don’t want to wear masks to Whole Foods. (And yes, I know “tax cuts” is a euphemism for “I’m cool with other people facing racism and misogyny in exchange for my taxes being lowered.”)
Maybe it’s my current frame of mind but I can’t help but be like, if people are dying of COVID-19 because they refused to wear a mask and get vaccinated when they had ample opportunity and idolized Donald Trump as he yelled about how Joe Biden’s a pussy for encouraging mask wearing and social distancing, that’s really on them and really not my problem. I refuse to rhetorically bend over backwards to infantilize adults who are perfectly capable of comprehending the blatantly obvious and widely-publicized consequences of not taking the necessary steps to combat a deadly virus. And, when these people’s stupidity also endangers their children and other innocent people who are forced to be around them, I’m really not going to mourn them when they get caught in the crossfire of their stupidity like maybe now, their kid can get vaccinated and won’t suffer a painful death alone in an ICU before they can even take drivers ed.
That being said, I think it’s a prime example of virtue-signaling when left-leaning people yell about how they’re going to keep on wearing masks despite being vaccinated even after the pandemic is over. Maybe it’s the red-blooded American in me but I loathe masks! I’m perfectly aware that in Asia, a lot of people wear masks in public but I live in Washington D.C., where the majority of people, including me, are fully vaccinated. This city’s built on a swamp, and I sweat excessively even without cloth over my mouth and nose so when it’s not required, I don’t wear a mask. I always carry one in my purse on the off-chance I need one and I don’t argue when the police officer at the Amtrak station tells me to wear a mask, but it’s genuinely weird to me that people are so holier than thou about mask wearing.
Then again, would we even be fully human without the steadfast desire to hold ourselves as morally superior to our fellow citizens for arbitrary reasons? I think not. I’m not above this tendency at my worst if not my best, but I’d like to think I’ve gotten better than I used to be after I forced myself to learn civility.