Apropos my last post, I happened across this image on Imgur yesterday:
COVID exhaustion
Aspects of our COVID exhaustion are due to the reality that many of us are carrying the weight of other’s [sic] irresponsibility.
Many go about their lives, unencumbered with any feeling of social responsibility, then feel justified in their carelessness, at least partially protected by the herculean [sic] efforts of others.
Not only are we carefully navigating a context foreign to us, sacrificially bearing a collective burden, we have to watch those efforts devalued by those who then pretend their carelessness is justified.
We’re holding a societal umbrella in a downpour; they’re laughing and pretending it’s not raining because they’re not wet. It’s exhausting.
(It’s difficult to find an undeniable source for this, as even this “source” is challenged by someone.)
If we all behaved like those others, this COVID-19 pandemic would probably look like the Black Death of the 1300s. Thankfully, as implied in the above quote, there are some of us who are relatively educated.
My search for a source also revealed this article: “We’re Exhausted From Bearing The Burden Of Others’ COVID-19 Irresponsibility” by Katie Cloyd. I mostly agree with Katie, but I’m just not as “sad”.
Further research led me to this article: “The Meltdown Crisis“. Apart from her racism, Tressie McMillan Cottom makes good points about how COVID has revealed to Westerners how “Cheap credit and cheap imports and cheap slave labor let us consume like we are rich when we are anything but.” Yup, couldn’t agree with that part more.
Back to Cloyd above though. It’s hilariously frustrating to me that the anti-maskers refer to those of us wearing masks as “sheeple”. What does that even mean? Who are the sheeple and who are not? If I have the same opinion on a topic as Bob, who is the sheep? Me, or Bob? If I have the same opinion on masks as Tedros Adhanom, the Director-General of the WHO, does that make me the sheep? (Presumably it doesn’t make him the sheep, as he’s never heard of me.) Is it possible that all of the anti-maskers are really the sheep of someone sitting at home in their basement who hates masks, perhaps the guy who started Qanon, or did they all spontaneously come up with the same thought at the same time? Who the hell knows, but it’s a bit ridiculous that a movement based on a bunch of people following someone else would call out people who subscribe to the same scientific theory as “sheeple”!