Morbidity and Mortality

There are a lot of new rules now. You have to wash your hands a certain way, you have to maintain a certain amount of distance, you have to wear a covering over certain parts of your face if you go out in public and you apparently now can never, ever purposely introduce your saliva to unpurchased grocery items.

And if there are new rules, how long do you imagine it will take before someone compares those rules to the Nuremberg laws? Usually without irony even though the people bringing them up are exclusively protestant Aryan Christian types and almost certainly belong to at least one club whose bylaws openly wonder if Jews are really such a good idea.

But this is America, and the First Amendment of the Constitution* guarantees the right to peaceably assemble. Yes, governors can issue stay-at-home orders but if people insist on getting together to spread the message of personal freedom and potentially lethal respiratory disease, they sort of can.

There's no part of virology or epidemiology that is susceptible to protest, however. I know we're still in the learning phase about how COVID-19 behaves and spreads, but I think it's by now almost definitely safe to say that it's largely impervious to rhetoric in the public sphere. I'd ask you to close your eyes and try to picture the demographics of these rallies, but a) it's hard to keep reading with your eyes closed and b) you don't need the media to euphemistically tell you they're "pro-gun advocacy groups and conservative activists" to let you know these are white people doing some white people shit.

Look, I'm a white people. My kids are white people. And like a good liberal, yes, I'm training them to apologize for it and be ashamed of it, in literally every social setting and context. That's the only way we're going to get to the atheist communist homosexual gynocracy every adult man who has ever bought an AR-15 both genuinely fears and somehow cannot stop masturbating to.

I know the argument is that Barack Obama got to be president, therefore racism has been solved. And yet none of these freedom fighters can make the connection between their casual, luxurious, optional noncompliance with public health initiatives and orders and the fact that the effects hit hardest among non-white populations. Privilege is feeling pretty sure you're going to live through something and assuming (with no investigation or even self-interrogation) that that's automatically true for everyone else. That's how you know if the pickup truck has that US flag with the blue stripe for the police, that's a white person's truck. And if you stumble across an anti-vaccination rally on the corner outside the vegan deli, that's a lot of blonde people. You'd think by this point there'd be a saying of some kind to sum up this disparity.

On the other side, this is also the group of people tied to a human being who just today thought he could improv riff his way to a cure for coronavirus during a press conference and came up with (AND ALL OF THIS IS TRUE) getting light into the body, killing viruses with heat (which, thankfully, someone was there to tell him that's how fevers work) and injecting ourselves with household disinfectants to fight COVID-19. This doesn't feel like a protest movement with legs. You know, because sometimes when you get coronavirus, they literally have to cut off your legs.

I guess they'll all know where they stand in about two weeks.

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*you know that list of things tacked on to the end of the document that is sacrosanct and should be taken literally but managed to leave at least 27 things out