Thank you for sharing, really, but understand that I could also slip into blind hatred over what I see as the suffering you and your culture have caused (not least being caregivers so scared by the hyped-up risk to younger and healthier people that they abandoned patients?!) but that would not be useful. As the minority opinion I’m also more likely to get flagged or banned, and I do use that handicap as a crutch sometimes (thanks @dang).
Perhaps the best option would be for us to get drunk and rage about this for a few hours or days. I bet I could rant for a lot longer than you, and I bet I understand your position better than you understand mine. Perks of being in the counterculture, I guess.
I feel like your point is probably important somehow. Could you make it with more sensitivity and less indignant contrarianism? Remember that you're replying to someone who has just lost a loved one!
Someone who in their grief also wishes me suffering and an agonizing death, perhaps as revenge:
> I wish every single one of them could experience the fear my grandfather did. Stuck in a bed, unable to walk, waiting for a plague to take them as their fellow patients succumb one by one.
Sensitivity is a nice-to-have, but the goal right now is averting outright war. If none of these bubbles can be cracked open, and everyone just keeps lurching toward violence, where it ends will make today’s tragedy look like mild inconvenience.
Please note I specifically said I wish they could experience the fear. It is not a wish for anyone to experience death, let alone a painful one.
People rarely have to confront the extent of the results of their actions and as a result don't really think on those terms. Personal experience is an effective, often painful teacher.
I can't claim to know your entire perspective, but from the outside, refusing to accept a temporary, minor inconvenience to one's life so we can reduce how many people have to die an agonizing death seems ... selfish, at best.
I myself am a person who suffers from depression issues that have only been magnified by isolation. And yet here I am, following the guidelines as best I can. I'm not at much of a risk of dying from COVID, but if I got it and infected someone who ended up dying from it - I'd never forgive myself.
Thanks for the reply. And er, good that you don’t actually want to go as far as killing me - there’s some wild shit out there right now. I would still be in favor of arguing about all the details over drinks, but for now I’ll just offer the roughest outline of the other perspective, which is:
Refusing to accept a temporarily increased risk of disease, and instead dramatically increasing the chance that your fellow humans will be crushed under the boot of fascism is... also selfish at best.
Ah, you're one of the ones who actually is rational about things.
Put it this way: your liberty to spread your germs ends just where my nose begins. Else we're just permitting tyranny by another route.
Currently there's a very infectious and deadly germ on the loose, so -under the above rule- everyone's freedom becomes more constrained than we'd ideally like.
It's certainly evil; but it's not the human evil of fascism causing it, but rather the natural world evil of a pandemic.
You exhale viruses. You exhale CO2. The campaign to remake society in response to these threats is, in its purest essence, a campaign to redefine the free human as a toxic animal. If successful, it will then be used to justify slavery and murder.
And to borrow a page from the global warming folks, we’re not going to wait and see whether that hunch is right, because by then it will be too late. It’s time to end this.
The USA actually dealt with a similar situation just over 100 years ago in 1918, and people did similar things, and the USA came through just fine as a nation (albeit 600000 citizens lighter :-( ) .
If you don’t already understand that argument as a perfectly obvious concern, we will probably not agree. It is obvious to hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people all over the world.
I recommend you look for conversations outside your usual bubble, and when you find someone to ask questions of, don’t pair the questions with insults.
I don't think I can excuse abandoning patients, but not all caregivers are young and healthy; so some of them would have reason to fear for their safety, or the safety of those they live with, or not want to spread disease among their patients.
Lots of stuff went wrong, and it's tragic that
Teknoman117's grandfather couldn't get discharged quickly. It would have been better to be at home without appropriate mobility care than to be in a facility without appropriate mobility care and an active outbreak.
Perhaps the best option would be for us to get drunk and rage about this for a few hours or days. I bet I could rant for a lot longer than you, and I bet I understand your position better than you understand mine. Perks of being in the counterculture, I guess.