No Lives Matter
There are some words and phrases I could stand to never hear again simply out of sheer exhaustion: “Distancing”; “The ‘New Normal’”. But there’s one I’m over with because it’s simply not true: “We’re in this together”.
Because we’re not. We’re clearly just not.
It was hard not to suspect a significant number of people were some terrifying combination of stupid and/or sociopathic after the last election. But we had to push those thoughts away and let them fade so we could continue to live amicably with family, friends, and neighbors.
Well, it’s no longer a suspicion. It’s a fact. It’s documented on a daily basis. You want to make a lame choice in a voting booth? Fine, that’s your right. But to pretend science isn’t real, to act-out like a three-year-old, to push back against what should be common sense — to the point where a security guard gets beaten to death simply for asking someone to wear a mask — to display the most reckless, stupid, and sociopathic behavior humanly possible for all the world to see? You have *no* right. Those are not just thoughts to be pushed away. Those are people to push away. Those are people to stay the fuck away from. It’s depressing to the point of despair when most people are already maxed-out in the despair department.
25 years ago, when we virtually banned smoking in every public place — including bars (which is the rough equivalent of asking someone to wear an N95 while in bed with their spouse) overnight — there was like one old guy who owned the corner stool who grumbled for a week and then… we rolled with it. Because it was common sense, and we knew second-hand smoke kills people, so that was that. If someone lit-up anyway, you asked them to put it out, and they put it out, and again, that was that. Now, asking someone to put a mask on gets you murdered.
That was the social and political culture then; this is the social and political culture now. One that we’ve so wonderfully crafted for ourselves. (Tangential: A shout-out to my fellow Gen-X’ers — who grew up in the culture “then”, and who are noticeably absent from these shit-show displays of madness.)
For people who like to scream — spraying their toxicity both literally and figuratively all over everything — “I have a right to be free; I have a right to live”, they’re doing a really shitty job of helping themselves to insure either.
We seemingly went from “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” to “Only My Life Matters”, but in reality, the only slogan so many people should be sporting on a bumper sticker or have embroidered on their red mesh hats is this:
“No Lives Matter”
