Casualties

Hello I am still trying very hard not to complain about my privileged personal situation, but I honestly wasn’t emotionally prepared for a level of government malfeasance and societal insanity that means I might have to stay locked down LITERALLY UNTIL A VACCINE IS DEVELOPED. I already did NOT want to get this virus—I guess I’m not one of those people who hears “just a bad flu” and thinks, “Well, dandy, that sounds FINE!”—but it’s so horrifying that nobody really knows what it does to survivors long term. If you’re an elite athlete who gets this, your career is maybe over. If you have a stroke, your life as you know it is maybe over. Will your kidneys ever be the same? God only knows.

Of course existence is unpredictable and nobody lives forever and nothing is guaranteed and afterlife and Stoicism and quantum physics and whatever, but it makes me so mad that the federal government hasn’t done a single useful thing during all this time when most of its citizens have dutifully done their best and tried to stay optimistic and waited for help. Instead we get chaos, discord, disinformation, kickbacks for the rich, and “Well, people in hell want icewater, too.”

If you’ve guessed that I’m feeling rather madder than usual at the Trump supporters enabling all this, you’d be right. My feeling is that to simply BE his supporter you’d have to believe that what the rest of us call “news” is a lie and that therefore it’s fine to believe whatever you can find on the internet. It’s so personally offensive to me—as a former cog in the machine that produced news—to hear disgusting generalizations about the evils of “the mainstream media” as if it were one unified entity and not human professionals I know named Laura and Brian and Karron and Karen making a long series of informed decisions as part of their damned jobs.

Will my relationship with people who refuse to join us here in reality ever be the same? That’s maybe over. More casualties.