Everything must be opened! Everything is already open!
Everyone dying of COVID is unvaccinated! What about long
COVID?
At the time, I was focused on the racism tearing our country
apart, without realizing the hell that would await us with the election of Donald Trump and the rise of white nationalism. I only knew our country was
splintering apart because we absolutely could not speak in anything but
absolutes.
As we come upon the dreaded two-year anniversary of the
COVID-19 pandemic washing ashore in the United States, we are again stuck in
that same awful situation where the extremes on both sides of any debate are
the loudest, and thus the most amplified.
On one side, you have the “everything must open!” side, who
is railing against any and all COVID-19 restrictions, which in most cases is
really just an anti-mask position. I live in Washington, D.C. and I cannot
stress enough how everything is open. I went to two pro wrestling shows in
mid-January surrounded by thousands of people. The notion things have been
closed is a right-wing fallacy. They rely on anecdotes of things closed in
certain cities, despite ignoring those are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Yet, there are also the so-called “doomers” who are fighting
any ease of restrictions like it’s the literal end of the world, even though
COVID-19 case numbers are dropping and it’s been firmly established that
vaccines really, really, really work. They rely on anecdotes of the vaccinated
getting sick or dying, despite ignoring those are the exceptions that prove the
rule.
Through it all, there is no legitimate ability for any
rational discourse on what a post-COVID-19 world actually looks like. Every day
on cable news, there’s only people on each extremes yelling at each other, or
in the case of Fox News, just at the camera to the viewer. There is no
thoughtful debate or introspection by either side.
It’s probably only going to get worse as government restrictions yo-yo back and forth from nothing to something. We saw this first-hand in Washington, D.C. when the Mayor stupidly fought a vaccine mandate while lifting the mask mandate as the holidays approached. If she had only done one, we would’ve been so much better off. Instead, no vaccine mandate combined with no mask mandate turned our fair city into ground zero for the omicron variant, as cases exploded here first before taking off across the country.
She finally instituted the vaccine mandate for restaurants,
arenas, and the like while re-instituting the mask mandate. Eventually, numbers
receded but it was too little too late, as just about everyone in this city got
sick, and schools were closed for weeks at a time because there weren’t enough
teachers.
I’m not a doctor or an epidemiologist. But it seems pretty
obvious to me that each subsequent wave – whether it was Delta or Omicron – arrived
after most governments had rescinded mask mandates. It’s going to happen again,
and it’s going to happen again because people let their guard down.
Additionally, there is not enough information or push out
there to truly blame the people responsible for the continued COVID-19 crisis –
the willingly unvaccinated. Again, the lede is being buried by the absolutes.
Any time someone says the unvaccinated are the problem, ten
more will jump in and yell, “What about kids under five?? What about the immunocompromised!?”
without understanding the point is aimed at the willingly unvaccinated. If
every American who could get vaccinated was vaccinated, the pandemic would be
over in this country.
The unvaccinated are the ones dying. The unvaccinated are
the ones overrunning hospitals. And it’s the willingly unvaccinated who make up
the vast majority of those numbers. But we can’t say that, because losers like Aaron Rodgers need to be coddled and treated like “free thinkers” even when
completely and totally going against science and facts.
It leaves us in a terrible mess where everyone is blaming
everyone else. It’s Joe Biden’s fault they aren’t vaccinated, even though it’s
not. It’s Democrats fault everything is closed, even though everything is open.
It’s an endless cycle of finger-pointing and blame that gets us nowhere closer
to the end, exacerbated by the fact we’re already in an election cycle despite
that still being eight months away.
The fundamental problem with the COVID-19 response isn’t the
COVID-19 response. The fundamental problem is that our country is broken. Our
media is broken. Our government is broken. Our judicial system is broken. Our
schools are broken. Our national discourse is disgusting.
How do we fix it? It will take all of us, working together,
to bring the national discourse to a more reasonable place and collectively
ignore the extreme elements from either side.
Oh shit, that’s what we said about COVID. Well, nevermind, we’re screwed.
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