13 December 2020

Trust me, I miss those posts, too.

I miss the bike ride over there, taking the long way around, dodging inattentive drivers, mumbling under my breath at kids who run into the street without thinking.

I miss feeling bitchy that I didn't get the good table (though to be fair, since they remodeled the store, there is no "good" table) and I miss getting itchy about my bike being locked up outside.

Not having Starbucks as a ride destination and a place to work away from home has seriously cut into my blog fodder and my chance to people-watch just to keep in touch with how people talk, how they move, how they act. Our county is one of the few around here that still has outside dining so I theoretically could ride over there and sit on the patio, but the tables aren't far enough apart for my taste, and it's just not the same anyway.

I'm taking this seriously. I don't wander around for fun, I don't hang around anyone outside my bubble (which is really only the Spouse Thingy) and when I'm out I try to stay as far from others as I can.

I haven't seen my mother-in-law since February.

I haven't seen my daughter-in-law since a short visit while standing on their driveway in early May.

I've seen my son all of four times, and two of those were because he was kind enough to come over and take the leftover cat food and other things I really needed out of the house. He stays masked up and keeps his distance, and I haven't been able to touch him.

The closest I've really come to other people is handing off my cats at the vet, and being in the room while the vet helped them die.

It all sucks. Everything has sucked since March.

But...as much as it sucks, what bothers me even more are all the photos I see online of people who still get together, still go out to restaurants, assemble in large groups for church, still refuse to wear masks because of reasons that don't make sense beyond a toddler's petulant You can't make me. We're still where we are in the US because of everyone who doesn't think the suggestions to stay at home pertain to them. Because they don't think they can get COVID or if they do it won't be "that bad." They don't believe the science. They think God and Jesus will protect them.

This is the Spouse Thingy at work.

Y'all know he works in a hospital, right?

He doesn't gear up like this for shits and giggles. He does it because COVID is real, he doesn't want to get it, he doesn't want to pass it along to patients, he especially doesn't want to bring it home. 

Every time you gather in groups, go to church and sing, eat inside at restaurants, you're spitting in his face.

"But this might be Grandma's last Christmas and we need to see her!"

Yeah, sunshine, you might be guaranteeing it's her last Christmas. You might be COVID+ and not know it, remain asymptomatic, and be the one who passes it along to her.

"Jesus will save me!"

Yeah, well, not in the sense you seem to think. I imagine right now he's doing a major face-palm because you should be using the common sense God made available to you. The Good Lord is not going to sweep down and save you specifically because you're a good person; a lot of really good people are dying from this. But if you believe, if you have faith, you understand that man's ability to make sense of science, to find the root causes of disease, and then the treatments, are OF HIM, and should be treated with the grace He deserves. As far as I'm concerned, when you deny science, you're denying God the credit for the gifts He's given us.

"Screw it, this only kills 1%."

And that's bullshit. It kills 1% of those who seek medical treatment. It kills upwards of 10% of those who don't. There have been 72 million cases of COVID worldwide; even at 1% you're saying that 7.2 million deaths are acceptable? Right now, the death rate is 1 person every 40 seconds. How is that in any way acceptable to you? And of those 72 million cases, those are the ones we know about. The number of untested asymptomatic elevates that number significantly.

I am astounded at the staggering levels of selfishness I'm seeing, peoples' unwillingness to inconvenience themselves for what will, in the grand scheme of things, be a short amount of time. 

I am angry. 

Hell, yes, I miss being able to ride to Starbucks and spend a mindless hour pretending to work while I watch people. But I can live without it, will live without it, for as long as it takes. You can live with one holiday season spent without gathering extended family; trust me, the military made sure we did it often enough, and it was not the Big Horrible you might think.

Just stay home, mask up when you can't, stop gathering in groups, give people healthy distance when you have to be around them, and be a freaking grown up for a while. It's that simple. It's that easy.