Alabama’s state health officer has to wear a bulletproof vest.
Let me put that another way: The guy who has recommended a simple, effective measure for slowing the spread of a deadly virus that has already killed a quarter-million Americans in less than a year is forced to wear a bulletproof vest because the people who he is trying to save are irrationally angry at him for trying to save them.
This is who we are now.
Idiots.
Self-centered, self-involved, maddeningly-indignant, gleefully-ignorant children in the midst of a never-ending temper tantrum because someone somewhere told you something that you didn’t want to hear.
The pure, unfiltered idiocy that has accompanied this pandemic in America is an embarrassment. And the death threats received by Dr. Scott Harris are just some of the sadder examples of it.
Every single day there is another conspiracy theory from another trailer park epidemiologist who’s been “crunching numbers” and can prove that this is all just another plot to control us by the gub’ment. That nonsense — usually from some guy whose only dealings with virology or statistics was the time in high school when he correctly calculated the number of condoms he needed on spring break — will fly around social media for a week or so, with a “something to think about” tag, and a bunch of people who really want a reason not to wear a mask or not to avoid a large gathering will latch onto it as if it didn’t come from someone they wouldn’t trust with a pocketknife.
But over here in reality, while you whine about your rights and bemoan the overbearing government that’s keeping you from packing the tables at Cracker Barrel, people are dying and barely surviving in hospitals all over the country, including here in Alabama.
Currently, this state has lost over 3,000 people to this virus — more than died on 9/11. While we don’t currently have a crisis within our hospitals, we’re inching that way.
And if you’d like to know what that’s like, we can talk to our neighbors in Mississippi or the poor folks of North or South Dakota.
Currently, Mississippi has just 12 percent of its hospital beds remaining and there are ZERO intensive care unit beds in its capital city, Jackson.
North Dakota is completely out of hospital beds. All of them. They’re at 100 percent capacity. Three state health officers have quit because the insane governor refuses to follow even their most basic advice. And COVID-positive nurses are now being allowed to work in the hospitals because they don’t have enough staff without them.
South Dakota is almost as bad, and now governors of neighboring states are now blaming South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem of creating a superspreader state.
And still, the governors there won’t issue statewide mask ordinances.
You people should be on your hands and knees thanking Scott Harris for having the courage to stand up to you dopes and try his best to protect all of us. And we should also be thankful for Gov. Kay Ivey and her willingness to take heat from her dopey Republican counterparts who folded at the first sign of the Trump base turning on them.
And, yeah, that’s where it’s coming from and we all know it — the cult of Trump. Which is, essentially, a group of privileged white children who want to be told only that what they believe is right, no matter how idiotic or plainly wrong it might be.
Trump knowingly started us down this path of insanity way back in March, when he first started downplaying this virus in public. Even as he was telling Bob Woodward — on tape — that this virus is deadly and much worse than the regular flu.
Trump chose the stock market over saving human lives, and he ended up losing on both. But to save face, his only option was to continue downplaying the virus, ridicule the people who took it seriously (Dr. Fauci, President-elect Joe Biden, etc.) and pretend that this was all just some big scam to run him out of office. He even told you, repeatedly, that this virus would vanish the day after the election, it “will be a miracle,” he said.
Well, guess what? It’s more than a week after election day and we just had one of the worst weeks yet for COVID spread and deaths. In El Paso, they’re rolling out mobile morgues. The Midwest is one big COVID hotspot. And schools all across the state and country are starting to shut back down.
But it doesn’t matter at all.
These people have managed to ignore nearly 250,000 dead Americans and millions more in hospitals. They’ll write this off too. And they’ll kill hundreds of thousands more on their mission to never have their lives altered in any way.
For the rest of us, I’d just like to tell Scott Harris and all the other doctors, scientists and nurses who have risked their lives and their Facebook friendships to try and save us that some of us out here do appreciate it. We see what you’ve done. We know what you’ve put up with.
And we’re sorry. Sorry that so many people chose the advice of a reality TV host over you. Sorry that so many found it so hard to wear a mask and stand six feet apart. Sorry that so many have chosen personal convenience over community safety.
And really, really sorry that so many people care so little about their fellow man.
