Happy late December!
I’m going to start this series of posts by being extremely cruel and vicious. Fair warning, I rant about Covid and the economy.
We are all still here (except for those of us who aren’t)* because the world can’t manage a mutating virus. In the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK, specifically, we can’t manage it because of three colliding social trends:
Big business putting profits over the lives of workers.
Governments enabling big business to trade workers’ lives for profit.
Stupid people not getting the Covid vaccines and boosters, not wearing masks (at all or often not properly), ignoring distancing, spouting poisonous and ineffective treatment information, and clogging up our hospital system when they do get sick.
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On the first two fronts, we Americans can seriously consider work stoppages and general consumer boycotts.
Any time we hear ‘small business at risk’ complaints, realize those are coming from Chambers of Commerce and large business lobbyists. Mom-and-Pop small business owners could benefit from the paid, supported furloughs the US needs to stall Covid in the next two months.
Any business owner still ranting that “People just don’t want to work!” should realize that means: “People don’t want to work for me.”
Or possibly: “The people who might have worked for me have died.”
If you can do so and keep your job, look at unions in your industry. We built the most-prosperous era of American commerce (1946-1970) with the help of unions. No matter what revisionist Republicans say.
If you can, change jobs. This is the best labor market in decades!
If you can’t, don’t beat yourself up about it. The American economy since 1979 has been designed to make rich people richer, and the rest of us too poor to build up effective savings, healthcare, and retirement funds…thus chaining us to bad jobs.
(You are not going to retire on five million dollars by avoiding avocado toast; that takes 35 years of heavy investments, generational wealth, and compound interest. You won’t get there playing the lottery, either.)
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As for Covid-deniers: sorry, fuck it, I have no more sympathy for antivaxxers and conspiracy idiots stealing hospital beds, medicine, equipment, and staff from ‘real’ patients.
Sepsis, stroke, heart attack, cancer, gall bladder patients…and victims of physical misfortune…are dying for lack of timely hospital care.
Hospitals are being overwhelmed, and the real late-winter surge hasn’t even started yet.
Healthcare professionals are being harassed, stalked, and attacked for doing their jobs.
Even Covid testing sites are being stormed and destroyed by anti-science mobs.
The antimask, antivaxx, anti-science lunatics can stay home and die. Or face the consequences of Long Covid should they survive.
Health insurers should refuse to cover Covid-related hospital costs of people who voluntarily refused the vaccines.
There is collateral damage for people with weakened systems and overloaded exposure to Covid.
I know this. I and most of the people I love are in some risk category or other.
But for the most part, lethal Covid is now a disease of the unvaccinated, apathetic, and terminally stupid.
I’m tired of people so spoiled they think saying “I’m done with the pandemic, I want my life back!” means the virus will politely step aside for them.
I’m tired of the pandemic, too. Right now I see only two solutions.
Politically and socially isolating those who are trying to overthrow our very civilization.
Letting nature and stupidity fight it out. 
*I am furiously bitter because I’ve lost people in this pandemic. Family, friends, writers and artists I adored.
I’ve lost people I don’t even know for sure I’ve lost, because fan writers and Twitter-friends can be notoriously hard to find in real-life.
I simply don’t know who has gone to ground waiting out the pandemic, and who has died or is debilitated from Long Covid.