[NOTE: Another one in the drafts folder I didn’t publish for some reason. Probably because the whole thing back then was making me so heartsick I didn’t want to bother.]

In my free time I’m reading a New Yorker profile of the new talk radio star, Dan Bongino, and there’s a passage quoting him as saying to his radio audience that

The day after Bongino riffed on the Arizona audit, he told podcast listeners that liberals are happy when conservative vaccine skeptics get sick. “These people want you dead” he said, and offered a call to action.

But “happy” isn’t the word for it. More like the hard cold satisfaction you get when a guilty verdict is announced. Justice was served.

Maybe that’s too cold for some and I appreciate that. I would have said the same at the beginning of this plague. It’s always confusion and fright at first when catastrophe strikes. But not now. The facts are in and have been for quite a while. We have the means to save lives we didn’t have back in 1918. But now people are demanding their neighbors not avail themselves of vaccines that can save their lives as a test of tribal loyalty, and that is a level of human depravity I never thought I’d ever witness.

MAGA antivaxxers are actively spreading lies about the vaccines and the science behind them. We see the stories over and over again of people reporting pressure not to get vaccinated from republican family and friends. It’s become politics. Now even Trump can’t convince them to protect themselves. And the hospitals are filling up with unvaccinated patients and that’s making it difficult for hospitals to take care of other people.

We could be mostly out of this by now if not for them. I’m out of sympathy and I’m out of fucks to give. If that’s happiness then why doesn’t it feel like that? I hate every part of this.

It’s times like this I can see my bitter Baptist grandmother in me. The one constant thing I hear said about her on that side of the family is she was a hard woman. As if that excused that stoney cold heart of hers. I can be that sometimes and no I don’t like being that and no I’m not happy. But as the saying goes, you made your bed now lay in it. Maybe that one person you might have convinced not to get protection if this hadn’t happened to you will live now.