The COVID Rant

 Over the past few weeks, my heart has felt especially heavy…and my tolerance and understanding increasingly low.

Covid is still heavily prevalent in our lives. For awhile there, things were looking up. Positive case numbers were decreasing, hospital admittance was low, and vaccines were available for all adults…and I had hopes that children would soon be vaccinated as well. I felt like I kept a nice balance of my views online. I supported social distancing and mask-wearing, but I didn’t want to go too far and alienate any family/friends that had *alternative* views.

I recently have abandoned that approach.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not harassing anyone. I’m not insulting anyone’s intelligence. I’m not name-calling. I’m not insinuating that large masses of the population are “asleep” or resemble a woolly farm animal; nor have I touted my ability to ignore anything that doesn’t fit my already formed opinion despite its importance…but I digress.

Even that last sentence makes me squirm. “You’re going to offend someone. You know people who are going to read that whole paragraph and think ‘She’s talking about me!’ and they are going to be mad…maybe you should rephrase it…maybe you should delete it…”

But why do I feel that way?

It has been made abundantly clear to me that those same people I am concerned about offending, are the people who have been condescending, insulting, and uncompassionate with their posts for months. They obviously are not worried about what I think, what I feel. Why give them the courtesy any longer? Frankly, I am fed up with being the bigger person. I am fed up with worrying about what others think of me. I am fed up with reading people’s public antagonizing posts and rants attacking how I (and my immediate family) have approached the pandemic, only for them to act friendly to me in more personal interactions.

Do you think I don’t read your statuses? Do you think I can’t see your shared posts? Do you think I am unaware of your commentary of the past 16 months? Do you think you can be so unapologetically rude with your online activity and I will not decipher what you think of me? Let’s just say you were too quick to insult my intelligence.

How can you be so hostile on this topic, anyway? Do you have a secret medical degree? Do you covertly moonlight as a nurse or other healthcare worker? Do you have inside knowledge of classified government information? Have you done extensive research and experimentation with infectious diseases? Have you lived through a plague that I don’t know about? Are you in possession of a crystal ball that allows you to have superior knowledge on how all of this plays out?  I’m fairly confident the answer to all of those snarky, yet valid questions are “no.”

I could share with you all the dozens of experiences from family members and friends who are nurses, doctors, and healthcare workers, but it wouldn’t do any good. There are thousands of those accounts online, and you scoff and dismiss everyone of them. I could express their plea of social-distancing, mask-wearing, and vaccinations, but that will also fall on deaf ears. I could relay their experiences of battling this virus…what it’s like to pour themselves into every patient, wearing themselves so incredibly thin that they, themselves suffer physical and emotional damage that will leave scars for years to come. I could express the fear and concern my teacher friends swallow every day, because they are caught in an unwinnable battle between medicine and politics. I can dive deeper into the anxiety and apprehension that I combat constantly with my own children, my own family. Would that make a difference? Would you, could you, possibly inch away from your rigid beliefs and perhaps see things for what they really are?

You are taking a global pandemic, a huge flurry of disease, death, fear, grief, and the inexperience of fallible humans, and you are dwindling it down to how it affects you and your ability to live in denial. You are taking a simple task like mask-wearing and you are comparing it to Nazi Germany. You aren’t even willing to wear one “in case” it makes a difference. We’ll ignore that local, state, and federal governments already have laws and regulations that you abide by without a fuss… a face covering is undoubtedly a direct assault on your personal freedoms and that supersedes the well-being of your fellow man. I know for a fact, that our forefathers were indisputably applying this very topic when mapping the foundations of our country. Yes, when choosing between the safety and health of American citizens and defending the skewed concept of “freedom = I can do whatever I want,” they definitely want you to spread a virus unnecessarily. Men and women have fought and died for centuries so you can infect and kill one another due to inconvenience and selfishness. But then again, no one is *really* dying, right? All the doctors, nurses, and scientists of the globe met in a secret bunker with journalists and government leaders and hatched an evil plan to deceive the world…because this is obviously just the beginning of… actually, I don’t even know what the point would be. Whatever it is, the democrats are behind it.

I won’t even dare go down the rabbit hole of vaccinations. The mask debate is enough to do me in. I think the scariest aspect of this pandemic is the exposure of people’s true colors. I see people I once considered to be kind and compassionate have really turned out to be shockingly cold and callous. The people I thought who would give anything they could to those in need have turned their backs and put their own inadequate understanding ahead of all else. They are putting hastily interpreted laws of country before the decency of humankind. This is only made more difficult now that the most vulnerable are our young children. In a verbally heavy nutshell, I am immensely disheartened.

I have recently unfollowed friends and family because I simply could not mentally ingest any more egregious nonsense; but I still know where they stand. I know the words they used, and the names they’ve thrown around. I know they expressed them often and without trepidation. I don’t know where to go from here. I do know I will continue through this pandemic doing everything I can to protect my children. I will continue to support all the healthcare workers by following their lead. I understand in hindsight we will learn what aided in reducing transmission and what didn’t, but I will have ZERO regrets trying to help keep people safe and healthy. I wonder if there will be any regrets insulting and alienating the people who cared about you.