Smokers, the obese and drug addicts aren’t the same. Here’s why.
If these are your loved ones, might want to put off Christmas shopping for them until, oh, maybe a few days before Christmas. Photo by Michael_Swann on Flickr CC0 2.0
When sexual headcase Robert Aaron Long killed eight people, including six Asian women at Atlanta spas in March and got arrested because he didn’t kill himself the way many mass shooters do, an outraged public demanded justice. That same month, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was taken into custody after killing ten people including one police officer in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket. Outrage, calls for change, blah blah blah. As did here in Toronto a few years ago when an underlaid nerd ran down women in a van after calling for an Incel Rebellion on Facebook.
When now-daily mass shooters are arrested rather than carted out in body bags we practically call for their heads on pikes for the innocent lives they’ve destroyed.
When infantile crybabies pitch public tantrums about having to wear masks, socially distance, and not take part in large indoor gatherings, and exercise their ‘freedoms’ by not vaccinating and putting themselves, the lives of their so-called ‘loved’ children, and masses of strangers in danger, we feel understandably helpless.
We can’t arrest the suspected killers; they’re doing nothing illegal and no one can prove they killed anyone. Even if their family contracts COVID, oh-so-coincidentally right after an outbreak linked to the Trump rally s/he attended, no one can be sure the family didn’t get infected elsewhere. If they’re all unvaccinated, who knows?
As Omnicron warp-speeds around the globe and promises to Make Christmas Suck Again, COVIDiots have become our new mass shooters. They’re the ones breathing potentially toxic germs on others, taking up valuable bed space in hospitals, choking out their last, painful breaths. On Reddit, the Herman Cain Award documents the content COVIDiots tweeted and posted before they drowned in their own lungs, or repented of their former anti-vaxx ways if they survived, or it applauds people who say they decided to get vaxxed after visiting the forum.
Those of us who wish we could Make America Great Again are getting very, very tired of COVIDiots doing everything in their power to hold America back. Americans are tired of not being able to live at least semi-normal lives because a bunch of spoiled, overprivileged brats — and I’m including all the black and brown brats too — won’t get vaccinated for a lot of really stupid reasons. None can read properly-sourced advice by subject matter experts documenting overwhelming evidence the vaccines work, that nothing Donald Trump suggests does, and the underwhelming global number of vaccinated people dying from COVID or the vaccine is minuscule compared to the unvaxxed, who are breaking healthcare systems everywhere and creating stress, burnout, mental breakdowns and PTSD in our healthcare workers.
We should have been past the worst of the pandemic by now, but healthcare workers watch a perpetual conveyor belt of tantrum-ing brats move into hospital wards or adjacent buildings, putting their own lives at risk and stressing their spirits even more. It didn’t have to happen. COVIDiots did this.
It’s not so funny today, is it? Especially the guy on his hands and knees in the mud coughing out his last. Their excuse was they didn’t have access to a Black Plague vaccine, because they lived 700 years ago.
All because of overblown narcissistic American individualism and exceptionalism. People who love their politics more than they love their fellow humans or even Jesus.
America needs a break. Our healthcare providers need a break.
Enough is enough
It’s argued that people who made bad lifestyle choices don’t just include the intentionally unvaxxed, yet are treated according to need rather than judged less worthy of immediate healthcare. This includes, among others, smokers, the obese, alcoholics and drug addicts. You could include drunk drivers and people who engage in risky, high-adrenaline activities like bungee jumping or auto racing.
But fat people don’t run around stuffing Big Macs down others’ throats, nor do smokers force people to blaze up. They’re no longer allowed to pollute the indoors as they once argued was their precious, God-given ‘right’. Addicts might mug you for drug money but they won’t corner you in an alley and stick a heroin needle in your arm.
No one wants to be addicted to substances, including food, and the reasons why people engage in and perpetuate what they know to be unhealthy living decisions are legion. They often pay their own price including increased health problems, decreased standard of living, reduced romantic and job opportunities, higher insurance rates, and increased mental illness. In the U.S., with its broken healthcare system and only a few shreds of a safety net left, there are few worse places to make stupid lifestyle choices.
The unvaxxed ‘fortunate’ enough to have survived are often faced with insurmountable hospital bills (Oopsie! Un/derinsured!) in a country where stupidity pays handsomely if you’re a healthcare C-suiter.
No, I will not contribute to your crowdfunding account.
The number of people for whom the COVID vaccines might be contraindicated are tiny. The best way to know for sure is to consult your doctor to see if you’re on the shortlist.
Not Gab and Parler, not QAnon, not numerous dumbass websites and media sources failing accuracy evaluations at Media Bias Fact Check, and certainly not a woman who looks like and contains more plastic than a Barbie doll. Your doctor knows you and your health problems and history best. S/he’s the best source for determining whether to get vaccinated against COVID.
Hey, you survived MMR as a kid without becoming autistic, right? Annual childhood DPT shots didn’t
Nicki Minaj CC0 2.0 image by Rory on Wikimedia Commons
kill you? You haven’t grown a second head out of your shoulder from the
smallpox vaccine, amirite? Many COVIDiots probably got an annual ever-changing flu shot until they were harder to source than toilet paper last year.
COVIDiots perpetuate each wave, drive small businesses out of business, burn out our healthcare workers and dangle the ever-looming threat of lockdown and restricted access to local goods over our heads. They’re part of the reason Jeff Bezos can shoot into space while underpaying his employees because COVIDiots are forcing us to depend on Amazon for anything we can’t get at a non-‘essential’ business.
Intelligent, rational, mature, and responsible people are losing patience with adult babies, especially ones who blithely walk around not caring who they murder because they won’t cover their piehole. The ones who ‘identify’ as Christians believe they have plausible deniability when they meet Jesus: “Whaddaya mean I was responsible for killing over a dozen people at a Stop The Steal rally? How was I to know I was infected? When I got sick I thought it was just a silly old cold! C’mon, you’re messin’ with me, ain’t you, Big J? It was all a big Deep State plandemic! Come on, Jeez, can you prove I did it?”
Meanwhile, good people who need immediate healthcare still wait, some of them living with internal time bombs if they don’t get the treatment and surgeries that keep getting postponed to handle so-called ‘more immediate’ COVIDiots. People who refused, in all their overprivileged First World glory, free vaccines to keep them and their so-called ‘loved ones’ alive that billions of other humans would give their meager life savings for. Our little brainiacs prefer conspiracy theories promoted by Tucker Carlson or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaxx documentary targeting particularly vulnerable black and Hispanic communities.
Never mind the appalling optics of a white man encouraging POC to, essentially, kill themselves. Maybe we ignore it because it’s Bobby Kennedy’s kid, rather than, say, Steve Bannon’s.
Make no mistake: Willfully unvaccinated POC are as blameworthy as MAGA cap COVIDiots. The Tuskegee experiments ended fifty years ago. Open your damn eyes and visit the CDC in 2021. You’re alive today, because of vaccines. You didn’t die of smallpox. You don’t live in an iron lung. You’re welcome.
COVID kills black and brown people far more effectively than white scientists ever have. Black Lives Matter, or is that only when white cops take them?
The global evidence since vaccines became available this year is plain. It refutes hysterics of all colors.
This doesn’t include anyone who can’t easily access the vaccine because of work requirements, child care issues or because they’re unfortunate enough to live in less-served rural areas. Or are genuinely at risk.
For them, I reserve all my sympathy.
Now some are debating the previously undebatable: Whether the unvaxxed should be moved down the triage line. One problem is some want to vaxx but can’t; at the moment, it’s impossible to determine who really couldn’t get a vaccine they wanted and who’s lying to get medical help. Triaging on the basis of lifestyle choices violates medical ethics and correctly scares other unfortunate lifestyle choosers who wonder whether the obese or smokers will one day be subjected to similar scrutiny.
To which I say: All of them put together have NEVER overstressed the system the way COVIDiots have. Pandemics may be with us for some time. How do you feel about a near-future pandemic without healthcare givers?
Can you blame them for throwing in the towel and saying, Fuck these people?
I think the triage conversation is one we need to have. What’s truly ‘unprecedented’ about the pandemic is how so pigheaded and politically divided we are that getting a proven vaccine is controversial for those who love their political beliefs more than their families, their fellow humans and even Jesus.
WWJD in a pandemic?
Maybe it’s time to let the unvaxxed exercise their right to wait for care like all the pre-pandemic people who have to wait for surgery today. Because of COVIDiots..
Tick-tock.
1832 cholera pit in Howard Park, Kilmarnock, Ireland. Funeral homes are stacking bodies to the ceiling in some states, so maybe we’ll be digging COVID pits shortly. Photo by summondbyfells on Flickr CC0 2.0
The aspiring Buddhist in me is uncomfortably aware of the value judgment on human life. In this, I understand why black and brown people are mistrustful of largely white healthcare. Or fellow unpopular obese, smokers, or addicts.
On the other hand, my inner crappy Buddha doesn’t lose sleep over punishments for mass shooters, and at least they’re not protesting in front of hospitals, because they’re in graves or jail.
None of those other lifestyle choosers willfully hurt others. When’s the last time anyone demanded a smoker, obese person or skinny-as-a-rail meth addict customer put their baby’s life in danger to satisfy some MAGAt’s toxic political stance?
A Texas couple wore face masks at a restaurant to protect their immunocompromised infant. The owner didn't like that.
I bet that restaurant owner is ‘pro-life’, too.
I wonder: Why are we urged to show more compassion for the uncovered unvaccinated than we do for mass shooters? Both made decisions to harm others.
A UK study reported a link between susceptibility to COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, and willingness to promote misinformation about the pandemic to Machiavellianism, psychopathy and collective narcissism.
Not unlike similar findings with mass shooters.
Fuck psychopaths.
#NotAllCOVIDiots, of course, there are those whose reticence is driven by scientific ignorance and risk overestimation rather than toxic politics, but will wear masks and be reasonably responsible. The in-your-face crybabies are selfish, irresponsible, and are now willfully potentially spreading death and sorrow every time they exhale.
Call me a terrible person if you like, but I think it’s time to move the unvaxxed down the triage line so that ambulances can pick up accident victims promptly. Yeah, maybe the victims were driving drunk or simply driving while stupid but until idiot drivers necessitate setting up ad-hoc ‘waiting rooms’ in parking garages, let’s keep them higher on the list too.
Ditto, everyone else on the ‘unfortunate lifestyle choices’ list.
I had a friend who got diagnosed with breast cancer at the beginning of the pandemic last year but was still able to get proper treatment. They caught it in time and her prognosis is now very good. I’m grateful to all the phenomenal healthcare professionals who saved her life.
I’d be ripshit furious if she was still waiting while some COVIDiot stole her hospital bed like these pseudo-scientists:
Yes, they look pathetic and in need of compassion. But I wonder how many people they took out along with themselves. I bet mass shooters look pathetic sitting in jail, too. Twitter
I don’t like mass shooters, and I don’t like mass breathers.
Time to turn these suicidals into social pariahs and restrict their ability to take as many innocents as they can with them. They made their choice. They can always unmake it with a better one.
Let them produce their vaccine passport, or a damn good reason why they can’t be vaccinated, or be refused service in all public places, including essential services. Let them pay for food and medicine delivery. Let them lean on friends, family and neighbors if they can’t afford it. Let them feel the consequences of choosing to be social pariahs because of their pigheadedness and unChristian concern for their fellow ‘God’s children’.
I wonder how that bright light tunnel greeting with Jesus went. Twitter
They don’t have the right to take the rest of us with them to the Pearly or Iron Gates.
The rest of us want to LIVE. And move on.
MAGA!
This was originally published on Medium in September 2021, so I updated it for the Omnicron world here.