My growing rage at the unvaccinated and unmasked

Not my prescription line at CVS but close enough.

We’re good at the big things.  We built two of the largest airplanes in the world, the Boeing 747 and the Lockheed C5 Galaxy.  We build enormous skyscrapers.  Hell, we built the first skyscraper ever to poke its nose into the air in 1883, the Temple Court building on Beekman Street in Manhattan, which towered over the rest of the city at 150 feet and 10 stories.  We built some of the largest freeways, like Interstate 90, which runs 3,020 miles from Boston Massachusetts to Seattle Washington, and we build some of the widest, including stretches of I-10 in Texas which are 26 lanes wide.  We build enormous harvesters that will cut down and thresh more than 100 tons of grain in an hour.  We build huge trucks and huge SUV’s and huge houses and huge sports stadiums and huge auditoriums and we even build huge riding lawnmowers with mowing decks six feet wide and more.

We know how to fly those massive airplanes and build even bigger and taller skyscrapers and drive on those sprawling freeways and operate those enormous harvesters and we can even drive our own great big riding lawnmowers. 

But we are not so good at the small things.  Take the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, for example.  An infinitesimal scrap of RNA that isn’t even technically alive, it’s kicking our asses.  It’s almost impossible to understand how tiny the virus is. Does 600 times smaller than a grain of salt grab you?  A thousand times smaller than a grain of sand on a beach?  It is not visible to the human eye, of course, and can only be “seen” with the aid of an electron microscope.  But that itty-bitty little piece of parasitic crap that isn’t even comprised of cells has killed 670,000 of our fellow American citizens and more than 4.5 million human beings worldwide.  It’s still spreading, still killing, and by now people are so fucking tired of it, they’re giving up.

Whole states are giving up, or at least their political leaders are.  Mississippi has given up, with the help of its governor, Tate Reeves, who has “led” his state to being one of the five least vaccinated in the nation.  West Virginia has given up.  Only 40 percent of its population is fully vaccinated, putting it at the very bottom of the rankings.  Alabama, under the “leadership” of Governor Kay Ivey, has given up on saving its people from this deadly virus, with only 40.5 percent of its people fully vaccinated.

But we know all this.  We’ve known it since they first started giving vaccinations back in the early Spring.  Almost nothing has changed from that time. 

Even the answer to why this is happening to these largely red states is known.  Their political leaders slavishly follow the “lead” of Donald Trump, who while fully vaccinated himself – as are all of the governors mentioned, by the way – has spent the last year and a half pooh-poohing not only the disease as a conspiracy against him, but the vaccines the development of which he and his administration presided over from way back in January of 2020.

Why Donald Trump would do this, essentially turning a decision about one’s health into a political loyalty test, has an easy answer and a hard one.  The easy answer is that he is feeding his base so they will vote for him if he runs for president in 2024.  The harder one is more personal:  knowing what he knows, that 670,000 of his fellow Americans have been killed by COVID and many of them have doubtlessly been his supporters, Trump simply doesn’t care.  As was written about him several years ago, “the cruelty is the point” with Trump, which applies here in the same way it applied when he was appointing the gang of little Nazis who separated children from their mothers and fathers at the border and then didn’t bother to keep records of who they were and where they were sent.  That was unknowably cruel, and so is his attitude about the people who have died because they are not vaccinated.  He didn’t care about the children on the border and he doesn’t care about the children in Texas and Florida who are being sent to school without masks because their governors want to make Trump happy.

We know that this tiny virus doesn’t care about any of this.  It just wants to replicate and keep itself going, a task at which it has been spectacularly successful for a year and a half now.  But we should care, and I have to tell you, I’m finding that harder and harder.  People who don’t get vaccinated in Mississippi and Alabama and Tennessee and Georgia and West Virginia and Florida and Texas don’t simply stay there.  They travel.  They spread the disease as they go, and those who haven’t been vaccinated and those who have alike, are the ones who suffer. 

And that’s another reason I’m finding it hard to have any feeling at all about those who refuse to be vaccinated and even those who walk around without wearing masks.  I encountered such a person the other day as I stood in line at CVS to pick up a prescription.  Nearly everyone in the store was masked, but the man in line in front of me wasn’t.  He was a big man – well over six feet with a thick torso and big, tanned arms and a crewcut – and he stood there gazing around, breathing all over the nearby row of vitamins and headache remedies…and me.  I was already standing away from him, but when he turned and looked my way, I stepped further back and made sure he saw me.  I wasn’t going to take up the mask issue with him, or ask whether or not he had been vaccinated.  It wasn’t worth it, and it didn’t matter anyway.  He was breathing normally in an enclosed space in a narrow aisle that acted like a canyon containing those of us who stood in line.  The people in front of him, and me immediately behind him, and those who passed us in the aisle on their way to shop somewhere else in the store – all of us were exposed to whatever he was carrying, even if it was just some bad after shave.

I’m tired of these fuckers.  I’m tired of reading about Florida and Alabama and Tennessee and all the other states filled with people who are not taking care of themselves or each other.  I’m tired of reading the day’s COVID statistics about vaccines and cases and hospitalizations and deaths.  I’m tired of reading about the children, especially those attending school, who are the real victims of these lunatics because even kids who wear masks are getting exposed every day, and they’re getting sick in record numbers.

After my visit to CVS the other day, I’ve discovered that what I’m really tired of are the people like the big, tall man who decided to ignore CDC guidelines to wear masks indoors and ignore the fact that he moves through the same spaces as other people and the decisions he makes don’t just affect him, they affect all of us.

Tracy and I have had breakthrough COVID even though we were fully vaccinated and followed all the CDC guidelines and thought we were taking every possible precaution.  We still got sick.

I’ve had it up to here with the politicians who are herding entire states over the cliff of this terrible disease, but most of all I’m filled with rage at the people who are still spreading this disease by refusing to be vaccinated or refusing to wear masks or both.  

If it were up to me…well, you don’t really want to know.