A test of loyalty
David Frum is gentler on the anti-vaxxers than I am.
Experts list many reasons for the vaccine slump, but one big reason stands out: vaccine resistance among conservative, evangelical, and rural Americans. Pro-Trump America has decided that vaccine refusal is a statement of identity and a test of loyalty.
And that’s profoundly wicked, because statements of identity and tests of loyalty are trivial compared to spreading a killer virus. Utterly utterly trivial. People have no right to put their identities or political loyalties ahead of public health. It’s disgusting and contemptible.
Part of the trouble is that pro-Trump state legislatures are enacting ever more ambitious protections for people who refuse vaccines. They are forbidding business owners to ask for proof of vaccination from their customers. They are requiring cruise lines, sports stadiums, and bars to serve the unvaccinated. In Montana, they have even forbidden hospitals to require health-care workers to get vaccinated.
So stay out of Montana for the duration, since you can’t be safe even in the damn hospitals.
As cases uptick again, as people who have done the right thing face the consequences of other people doing the wrong thing, the question occurs: Does Biden’s America have a breaking point? Biden’s America produces 70 percent of the country’s wealth—and then sees that wealth transferred to support Trump’s America. Which is fine; that’s what citizens of one nation do for one another. Something else they do for one another: take rational health-care precautions during a pandemic. That reciprocal part of the bargain is not being upheld.
This is what makes me want to smack people like Tucker Carlson and Lauren Boebert. They’re enjoying flashy careers here and they refuse any reciprocal duty.
… there’s no getting around the truth that some considerable number of the unvaccinated are also behaving willfully and spitefully. Yes, they have been deceived and manipulated by garbage TV, toxic Facebook content, and craven or crazy politicians. But these are the same people who keep talking about “personal responsibility.” In the end, the unvaccinated person himself or herself has decided to inflict a preventable and unjustifiable harm upon family, friends, neighbors, community, country, and planet.
Will Blue America ever decide it’s had enough of being put medically at risk by people and places whose bills it pays? Check yourself: Have you?
Hell yes, and I have all along.
Now that I think about, the stupid fuckers are responsible for rising health insurance premiums, and the county hospitals with unpaid Covid 19 Bill’s are subsidized to cover the vaccine freeloaders.
Oh, and the WaPo ran another scoldy piece to liberals about insulting Trump conservatives. “Talk to them. Get to know them.” Aside from being called a commie pinko for the last 20 years, I haven’t actually learned much this way. My kindness has been to leave Facebook and Twitter so I don’t have to see it anymore.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/22/stop-insulting-trump-voters-their-concerns-talk-them/
Does anyone besides me notice that the “liberal media” really aren’t all that – liberal?
I have talked to them; I am surrounded by them on every side, all day, every day. I work with them. I teach them. I go to the grocery store with them. I see them in their yards, their trucks, their SUVs. I see the Confederate flags they fly, and the guns they display prominently. I read their bumperstickers, because they are always pulling out in front of me.
Has WaPo ever talked to them? I mean really talked to them? Not a fly through, let’s go to the closest coffee shop in Omaha and find some real midwesterners (I’ve got news for you: try Nascar tracks, McDonalds, and gun ranges. Coffee shops are for sissies, didn’t you know that?)
I have news for WaPo – I don’t want to talk to them. It’s frightening to talk to them. It’s depressing to talk t them. Not because I am blinded by ideology, but because they are. They hate women like me…because I have a degree, and because I think for myself (as much as possible – none of us are perfect) I am shrill, uppity, a bitch, a ball buster…no matter how nice I am, I am already labeled.
I don’t know about Omaha’s coffee shops, but in my experience coffee shops in Lincoln are filled with my kind of people. So, yeah, probably what Trumpers would call sissies.
On my last trip to Lincoln to see my nephew and his family, we went to a pumpkin picking patch thing and all day they blared not just country music, but religious country music. So, I think once you get out of town in Nebraska, the Redness just gets redder (only thing they all agree on is that passing a football is too modern. Do it all on the ground game.)
Very good assessment. Exactly. I enjoy Lincoln, and have a lot of friends there, but most of them have jumped on the trans bandwagon, so it’s only somewhat of a comfort. Here in my smaller city, it’s Christmas Red (and you’d better not call it X-Mas Red…they are definitely fighting the war on Christmas here, even though no enemy to fight has ever shown their face. As long as it’s not in the government buildings, I leave ’em alone. They can have as much splashed across their own yard and house and church as they wish).
And I spend quite a bit of time in the coffee shops in Lincoln. Yeah, it’s mostly liberals. Which, of course, Trump would probably consider sissies, because we give a damn about other people. Omaha is slightly more liberal than Lincoln; in fact, a lot of rural Nebraska likes to pretend Omaha isn’t part of Nebraska at all.