It’s been just shy of a month since my local area finally began pushing for the closure of non-essential businesses and taking the situation seriously. I’m still working and, in an interesting twist, business is quite high right now — the demand for game console repairs and, of course, games to go along with said systems is pretty high when most people have nothing to do, and so life is still mostly normal for me.
For others, not so much. I could devote whole articles to just individual aspects of the past few weeks, but it’s been a hell of a ride. Between the fact that, as always, tons of people think this is all some kind of conspiracy (including one guy who told me directly he simultaneously “didn’t have the virus” yet also said that “everyone already has the virus and it’s just a chemical which triggers it” — no, I’m not making that up either), and these absolute fucking idiots who are protesting, demanding that cities and states re-open and life goes back to normal. well, shit’s pretty wild to say the least, especially here in the south, where churches are fighting tooth an nail to be open (they can’t stand to not get those parishioner donations, after all) with no regard for the fact the virus can, and will, inevitably, get spread.
There’s an incredible irony too that people from all of the above categories are contracting and dying from the disease – those claiming it’s a hoax, that their deity of choice won’t allow them to contract the disease, or those just thinking it’s such a small number of people who get sick and die it won’t affect them and thus they go about things as normal; these people are contracting and dying of the disease in a case of what, sadly, almost seems like an ultimate kind of Karma. As I said before shit got serious in the United States, people need to take the virus seriously, if not for their own sake, for that of others.
Of course, that doesn’t matter to many. Right now the protests happening here and there to re-open look to be populated by stereotypical “Karen’s” (you know, the type of person who’s the subject of he “can I talk to a manager” internet jokes) whining about not being able to get their hair and nails done or go bowling or golfing. Staying at home, and those employees staying at home, isn’t what’s important — what is is their right to be entitled rich fucks.
What I find hilarious is how well this all demonstrates how many people don’t actually do anything — they don’t create, they don’t have activities they can do alone, they have to go out to have fun, they have to have other people serve them, in a sense, slices of life — they rely on business to even keep themselves happy, which is a damn shame.
In an equally ironic twist, it shows where most people have their priorities in life and, even worse off, who in the world has even a reasonable amount of money compared to, let’s say, someone like me.
I want people to stay home; to stay safe and alive, and for their friends and family to do the same till this finally blows over (which won’t be for a long time — even early last month I was expecting over a year for things to begin to go back to normal.) These people don’t care — they want things normal now, don’t care who lives or dies so long as they can have their cushy lifestyles… and they are the ones with the “good” jobs, the ones who constantly talk shit about those very people they are wishing were at work, be they truly essential like store workers, or people providing less critical services.
I could get incredibly political here, but I won’t. What I will do is bring up one more thing – the stimulus checks, our pathetic one-time 1200 dollar payment that apparently still counts against our taxes next year — seriously, why the fuck would they hold it against us?
Anyway, the first checks began being deposited to accounts last week, and that marked a major boom in shopping. People didn’t pick up things they needed, however — oh no, many picked up things they wanted. In doing my normal “buy food as quickly as I can and hope I don’t get sick” run, I saw TV’s, Computers, and all kinds of other semi-essential to clearly non-critical shit being purchased. To be fair, it’s not my place to judge what people buy — it’s their money to spend, but I feel like our current administration knew this is what people would do and, with sales picking up, they will say something like “the economy is doing great, people want to go out and shop, let’s reopen” and use that terrible logic to doom more people.
It’s incredible some of the parallels between this illness and the “Spanish Flu” of 1918, including this similar build up to a push towards normalcy which is obviously premature — we’ve only just begun to slow new infections — not stop them, not get a negative growth rate, but just slow it down some. We’ve delayed total infection of the entire population from about 20 days to maybe 40 at current rates… to re-open would ensure this goes right back to being just weeks away and the likely death toll skyrocketing. Some areas are already experiencing second waves of infection rates… and yet no one listens. No one cares what experts have to say — at least, not actual experts on these topics. Nope, they don’t know anything, but reality TV rejects and actors who haven’t had good roles in 20 years totally know everything, right?
Oh, I could go on and on with all this. I originally planned to write more of these updates but this shit is so damn depressing I just can’t bring myself to write more than once every few weeks. Maybe I’ll have more to say coming up, but for now, I’ll end with stats:
Shelby County, my home county, is now top for infections at 1800. TN on a whole is at 7000 infections currently with 157 dead. 3800 have recovered, marking a current 52% recovered rate. The US on a whole is now at 826,000 cases with 45,000 deaths, and globally we’re at over 2.5 million cases with over 178,000 deaths. The United States is now the epicenter of the disease, of course, thanks to our lax policies on this and being extremely late to even beginning to take this seriously. We should have shut down with the first few cases and the first warnings, but no, we didn’t.
I hate to sound like the bearer of bad news, but mark my words – this is going to get way worse before it gets better.
More, shall we say, happy, articles to come.