You Shouldn't Make Fun of People for Making Light of COVID 19 Before Dying From It OR SHOULD YOU?
It speaks to just how nasty and bitterly divisive public discourse has become that thinking that people shouldn’t make fun of unfortunate souls who take to Facebook to ridicule masks and vaccinations, only to die of COVID not much later, strikes folks as performative faux-sensitivity rather than basic human decency.
Yet I am not so spiritually evolved and selfless that I do not derive at least some manner of dirty, dirty schadenfreude out of Facebook posts juxtaposing MAGA die-hards angrily insisting that Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Demoncrats can suck their greasy balls if they think they’re getting one of Dr. Faucet’s Devil Shots with somber announcements of their agonizing death from COVID and the details of their funeral.
I recently discovered a popular Reddit devoted to these deluded skeptics called the Herman Cain Awards, after the Republican politician who made light of COVID 19 shortly before dying from it himself. The typical Herman Cain Awards post is 15 smug memes about Dr. Fauci being Hitler and the vaccinated being sheep followed by somber news that another prayer warrior had been called home after a losing battle with COVID 19 but would remain a blessed memory for everyone fortunate enough to know him.
It amazes me that Conservatives can look at the four deaths of Benghazi and see an unconscionable tragedy that can never be forgiven or forgotten and look back at the terror attacks of 9/11 as a game-changing trauma of historic proportions yet dismiss the nearly 700,000 American COVID deaths as a non-story.
Then again the people who post defiantly about COVID precautions as an evil, Fascist form of societal control don’t genuinely seem to think that 700,000 people have actually died of COVID.
Instead they think that people die of Cancer or old age but they list the cause of death as COVID 19 to hurt Donald Trump politically and also because hospitals get a million dollar check from George Soros and Bill Gates for every fake Coronavirus diagnosis.
Alternately, they think that big tech, in collusion with the far-left FAKE NEWS media have conspired to create a health “crisis" every bit as manufactured, in their minds at least, as the Russian hoax or the pee tape.
If I were a right-winger virulently against masks and the vaccines I would nevertheless refrain from making light of COVID 19 out of deference for the feelings of people who have gotten the disease or lost people to it.
Alternately, I would stop myself from posting a meme about how COVID 19 ain’t shit, COVID 19 ain’t real and anyone who is scared of contracting the deadly pandemic is a stupid baby who probably still shits themselves and should wear a diaper on their butt as well as their face so that I don’t up the recipient of a Herman Cain Award.
You know how Herman Cain Award winners could have avoided getting COVID 19? By wearing a mask. Or by getting vaccinated.
Yet the cheap buzz that comes with posting an anti-mask/anti-vaccine meme on Facebook and getting likes and words of encouragement from like-minded folks is apparently so intense and so irresistible that it causes them to ignore the nagging voice inside their minds warning them that if they are, in fact wrong and that COVID 19 is real and deadly, and they die from it then they’ll look not just bad but stupid and suicidal and perversely insensitive.
There are many, many wonderful reasons to wear a mask and get vaccinated and refrain from posting on Facebook about how vaccines and masks are for weak-minded slaves to the system, like not dying of COVID 19 and also not looking like an asshole and a lunatic for mocking the very disease you might end up dying from.
I am not in favor of shaming people for mocking COVID 19 before dying from it. But if the prospect of being publicly humiliated can keep folks from bragging about not being vaccinated or wearing masks and get them vaccinated then there is perhaps something very real to be gained from social media posts ironically pairing posts of mindless rebellion with the fatal results of such selfishness.
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