The Bright Side

“I guess the bright side,” said the skeptical lady on Facebook, “is that 99.98% will survive this ‘pandemic’.”

You’ve seen comments like that: The resort to numbers. Here’s how many die from the flu every year. Here’s how many die in traffic accidents. Why are we making a fuss over this one? Aren’t opponents just using it as an excuse to embarrass the President? Isn’t the government just using it as an excuse to take away our freedoms?

Well, we would say at first, stating the obvious, traffic accidents aren’t lethally virulent. Well, we would say, we have shots for the flu.

Now we just play out the numbers.

Current U.S. population: 331,002,651.

99.98% survival: 66,200 dead.

U.S. Covid-19 fatalities to date: 89,439.

The bright side!

But the argument, with its veneer of rationality, isn’t about that.

It’s not about who dies.

It’s about who survives.

It’s about the price the survivors are willing to pay for their survival.

And as long as it’s someone else doing the dying, what’s the problem?

This used to be the stuff of satire: You take an argument to its extreme to reveal its nature. Only now people aren’t bothering to hide it: They reveal their nature on their first move. They reveal how many deaths they’re casually willing to abide to maintain their lifestyles. They’re the ones throwing the women and children (and grandmas) off the lifeboats.

They’re the ones wondering why we hate them so much.

Truth be told, we don’t hate them. We despise them.

“It’s unfair to associate Trump supporters in general with these types,” complains a Trump supporter about reactions to that video of Long Island protesters waving signs like HANG FAUCI.

And yet, every Trump supporter we’ve seen is happy to sacrifice others for their own convenience. They’re happy to abide school shootings. They’re happy to abide kids in cages. They’re happy to abide the devastation of Puerto Rico. They’re happy to abide racism. They’re happy to abide death.

And they never grieve.

Ever.

89,439 deaths to date. We passed Vietnam weeks ago. We’ve already passed Nagasaki. We’ll be into six figures by the end of the month. Two-thirds of the way to Hiroshima.

They do not grieve. They do not mourn. The bright side is that it’s not them.

Yet.

nojo
11:28 am • Sunday • May 17, 2020
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10 Comments

ManchuCandidate

4:51 pm • Sunday • May 17, 2020

“One sick in my administration is a tragedy. Almost 90 thousand dead in 4 months is a flu season.”
-Trump

5:58 am • Wednesday • May 20, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3P3m0yFl34&t=20s
Interesting article on the Pandemic and RW protests (which are causing a spike in COVID-19 cases where they happened.)

nojo

8:20 am • Wednesday • May 20, 2020

@ManchuCandidate: Guess that’s gonna be the next few months: Everybody learning the hard way.

¡Andrew!

11:57 am • Wednesday • May 20, 2020

@nojo: What I don’t get is that we’re only +two months into this, infections and deaths are still going up even in places like Washington where we’ve ‘done everything right,’ we’re closing in on 100,000 dead, and the media and GOPKKK are already bored and referring to the pandemic in the past tense as states “reopen.”

We know from the history of the 1918 flu that the majority of people died in the second wave, that’s apparently well-underway in Florida, Georgia, Texas, etc, no matter how much they cook their books. Is our dum dums learning?

3:50 pm • Wednesday • May 20, 2020

@¡Andrew!: These people live n a world where if it doesn’t affect them personally, it’s not real. The virus ain’t real. The mask at Costco is.

So: Will they learn? Soon as folks they know start dying.

3:51 pm • Wednesday • May 20, 2020

@nojo: How they ever learned object permanence is beyond me.

12:03 am • Thursday • May 21, 2020

@nojo:
I would hope so, but I got the feeling they’re going to blame everyone but themselves and Trump because it would be against their MO to look within.

11:09 am • Friday • May 22, 2020

Well, looks like the South wants to become the newest epicenter for CoVID19.

11:59 am • Friday • May 22, 2020

@ManchuCandidate: Spittle seems the primary transmission vector, so all those god-fearing rednecks are going down first.

blogenfreude

2:18 am • Saturday • May 23, 2020

It is astonishing that Trump isn’t sick, or dead. But we live in hope …