It Ain’t Over

Let’s start with some facts. The United States is again leading the world in new Covid cases. Florida alone accounts for more than one in five new infections stateside. More broadly, vaccination rates correlate with Trump voters by county, and you can guess which direction that goes.

Oh, and hospitals everywhere are reporting that the new cases they’re seeing are almost totally among the unvaccinated.

And the National Review has decided it’s all our fault.

“Vaccine resisters can’t be persuaded if they feel disrespected”, read the NR tweet making the rounds last week. Which, yeah: Stupid fucking idiots breeding variants that may yet take us down with them, not a whole lot of empathy and compassion here.

But setting aside NR’s congenital dishonesty, some folks less amorally virulent took up the matter. Maybe they have a point! Maybe these white racist yahoos we’ve been politically coddling for forty years just need more coddling!

Okay, we’re paraphrasing.

Among the vacuously generous responses, a couple of practical ones stood out.

“Last week I spoke to over 5000 people in rural Georgia,” reported one doctor. “Most were not vaccinated because they still had questions. EVERY question they asked was legitimate and important.”

And you know what? Yes! We’ve heard examples of this all along: People not knowing that free means free, people unsure about the side effects (Moderna #2 was a whopper), people who just don’t mainline the news like we do, which you’re likely to find in rural Georgia.

We’re certainly not calling them racist yahoo fucking idiots! They’re not the problem!

And if that was all we were dealing with, people who simply haven’t been reached with the Good News yet, there wouldn’t be a problem.

The good doctor doing good work apparently didn’t encounter anything otherwise in her travels, which, fair enough. But we’ve seen enough on Facebook to know that wasn’t the whole story.

And then, sparing us the effort, someone else went to the trouble of sorting the phenomena. Among her eight categories:

• Political

• Suspicious of authority (govt./“big pharma”)

• Social/peer conformity

• Hippie wellness

• Religious/end times

• Militant

Yup! Lines up! Beyond honest fear and confusion, we’re dealing with a mass of recalcitrant head cases, every one of which — besides the damn antivax crowd — could easily overlay that county Trump voter chart.

Because That Guy’s denial and incompetence has been politicized from the start, leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths between these shores. The holdouts would see us all dead before admitting to the reality of it — see themselves dead, denying their own condition to their last breath.

And the National Review has the audacity to blame us for this? Take it to your friends at Fox News, gang. Maybe get Tucker to fess up to his own vaccination, for starters.

But really, it was the “disrespected” line that got us. Right Wing Ivy-educated elites have been trotting that line out forever, using it to flare resentment in the very racist fucking yahoos they themselves piss on from their considerable heights. They have been deliberate and methodical — and effective — in their efforts for generations, and to pull that move yet again, knowing damn well the cheerleaders for that supposed resentment, just shows them for the moral cretins they are.

They don’t care if you die either, racist fucking yahoos. They just want you to blame someone else for it.