💾 Archived View for going-flying.com › ~mernisse › 07.gmi captured on 2022-06-03 at 23:00:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I live in the United States. I am lucky in that my state has done a really good job of managing the current pandemic but for a variety of reasons the broader response in my country has been... ineffectual. In spite of polling that shows that most of the country is in favor of social distancing and face covering guidelines that provably prevent transmission of this disease media outlets and politicians act like there is still a debate to be had, and as a result comparatively small groups of people continue to behave in wildly irresponsible ways, driving up infections and ultimately deaths.
Most of the lip service is being paid to 'the economy'. I get that the economy is a large, complex, and extremely interconnected thing but at the end of the day the economy is a human construct. We made it up, we continue to re-make it every few decades. The economic system in place in the US today is not the same as it was when the country was founded, it isn't the same as it was when Reagan was president, in lots of ways it is wildly different from when Clinton was president and yet it is treated as this vaunted, immutable construct that is out of our control. People point and wring their hands, bemoaning the damage we are doing to it in terms of lost productivity and slipping consumer confidence and I can't help but hear "I don't care how many people die as long as I get paid."
In fact I think that's the root of this general haze of frustration I have been feeling lately. All of the stories I of people going to beaches, or large unnecessary gatherings, or the social media 'influencers' throwing huge house parties translate in my head to "I don't care who dies" and it disgusts me. No one is holding people accountable for their selfish actions while we stack corpses in refrigerated trucks before piling them in un-marked graves. People complain they can't travel, complain about missing sports, complain about 'missing graduation', or wondering when schools will re-open in the midst of literal thousands of people dying. A day. In this country alone.
How are we not better than this? How are we not smarter than this? How is the narrative not 'lets rally together to defeat this disease', 'lets protect each other', 'lets support each other'?
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