Post by Deleted on Aug 20, 2021 23:06:01 GMT
This says it all. Some of us in America have lost our damn minds.
The Quiet Rage of the Responsible
Let’s talk for a minute about Lollapalooza. After canceling in-person events last year, a few weeks ago Chicago once again hosted the long-running music festival, drawing more than 385,000 people. Many feared that the huge, raucous crowds could produce a coronavirus superspreader event.
But the festival required proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test for entry, and it introduced indoor mask requirements halfway through. And very few people appear to have been infected.
What does this tell us? That the return to more or less normal life and its pleasures many expected Covid vaccines to deliver could have happened in the United States. The reason it hasn’t — the reason we are instead still living in fear, with hospitals in much of the South nearing breaking point — is that not enough people have been vaccinated and not enough people are wearing masks.
It’s possible to have sympathy for some of the unvaccinated, especially workers who find it hard to take time off to get a shot and are worried about losing a day to aftereffects. But there’s much less excuse for those who refuse to get their shots or wear masks for cultural or ideological reasons — and no excuse at all for MAGA governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas and Doug Ducey in Arizona who have been actively impeding efforts to contain the latest outbreak.
So how do you feel about anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers? I’m angry about their antics, even though I’m able to work from home and don’t have school-age children. And I suspect that many Americans share that anger.
The question is whether this entirely justified anger — call it the rage of the responsible — will have a political impact, whether leaders will stand up for the interests of Americans who are trying to do the right thing but whose lives are being disrupted and endangered by those who aren’t.
To say what should be obvious, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in public spaces aren’t “personal choices.” When you reject your shots or refuse to mask up, you’re increasing my risk of catching a potentially deadly or disabling disease, and also helping to perpetuate the social and economic costs of the pandemic. In a very real sense, the irresponsible minority is depriving the rest of us of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/covid-masks-vaccine-mandates.html
It's time the right dropped the stupidity. Time after time the right is shown they are completely wrong, but instead of recognizing they are wrong it's always somebody elses fault, specifically the media. This issue of vaccination should not even be debateble. But we have idiots wjo seem to thibk that the government has no right to govern thrm. That's not how it works.
I am not Einstein, but the people we elect work for us. This is my understanding of how the system is supposed to work. So ask yourself this question: If you were hiring a person for a job and you interviewed a candidate who told you that your company was useless and the less your company got in the way, the better things would be, would you hire that person? I wouldn’t, but that’s exactly what we did from 1994 through 2007 and again in 2010. 2010 was the first backlash against the first black president. The very people who called themselves the Tea Party, sat on their derrieres for 8 years watching a president spend like no tomorrow for a war he started for no reason, but suddenly they found deficit cutting religion in 2009.
They elected a congress with a majority who believed that government has no role then wondered why Washington wasn’t working. But that’s where they got it wrong, Washington was working. The federal government was working exactly the way the people who we hired promised. “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. They didn’t want to terrify us, so they didn’t help.
And yet the right continues to repeat the stupidity.
The Quiet Rage of the Responsible
Let’s talk for a minute about Lollapalooza. After canceling in-person events last year, a few weeks ago Chicago once again hosted the long-running music festival, drawing more than 385,000 people. Many feared that the huge, raucous crowds could produce a coronavirus superspreader event.
But the festival required proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test for entry, and it introduced indoor mask requirements halfway through. And very few people appear to have been infected.
What does this tell us? That the return to more or less normal life and its pleasures many expected Covid vaccines to deliver could have happened in the United States. The reason it hasn’t — the reason we are instead still living in fear, with hospitals in much of the South nearing breaking point — is that not enough people have been vaccinated and not enough people are wearing masks.
It’s possible to have sympathy for some of the unvaccinated, especially workers who find it hard to take time off to get a shot and are worried about losing a day to aftereffects. But there’s much less excuse for those who refuse to get their shots or wear masks for cultural or ideological reasons — and no excuse at all for MAGA governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas and Doug Ducey in Arizona who have been actively impeding efforts to contain the latest outbreak.
So how do you feel about anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers? I’m angry about their antics, even though I’m able to work from home and don’t have school-age children. And I suspect that many Americans share that anger.
The question is whether this entirely justified anger — call it the rage of the responsible — will have a political impact, whether leaders will stand up for the interests of Americans who are trying to do the right thing but whose lives are being disrupted and endangered by those who aren’t.
To say what should be obvious, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in public spaces aren’t “personal choices.” When you reject your shots or refuse to mask up, you’re increasing my risk of catching a potentially deadly or disabling disease, and also helping to perpetuate the social and economic costs of the pandemic. In a very real sense, the irresponsible minority is depriving the rest of us of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/covid-masks-vaccine-mandates.html
It's time the right dropped the stupidity. Time after time the right is shown they are completely wrong, but instead of recognizing they are wrong it's always somebody elses fault, specifically the media. This issue of vaccination should not even be debateble. But we have idiots wjo seem to thibk that the government has no right to govern thrm. That's not how it works.
I am not Einstein, but the people we elect work for us. This is my understanding of how the system is supposed to work. So ask yourself this question: If you were hiring a person for a job and you interviewed a candidate who told you that your company was useless and the less your company got in the way, the better things would be, would you hire that person? I wouldn’t, but that’s exactly what we did from 1994 through 2007 and again in 2010. 2010 was the first backlash against the first black president. The very people who called themselves the Tea Party, sat on their derrieres for 8 years watching a president spend like no tomorrow for a war he started for no reason, but suddenly they found deficit cutting religion in 2009.
They elected a congress with a majority who believed that government has no role then wondered why Washington wasn’t working. But that’s where they got it wrong, Washington was working. The federal government was working exactly the way the people who we hired promised. “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. They didn’t want to terrify us, so they didn’t help.
And yet the right continues to repeat the stupidity.
