People's breath has been weaponized. That's the threat facing us right now. Every time you leave your home, you face the possibility that some perfectly robust looking individual will cough or sneeze or laugh or otherwise exhale forcefully and envelop you in a cloud of microscopic particles that could infect you. Once infected, you will find out how this new disease interacts with your particular genetics and physical condition. Your odds get worse if you are over 60 years of age, but old people have survived with minimal ill effects and young people have died of complications. You just don't know.
In a situation like this, you'd think that adoption of some rudimentary precautions would be universally accepted. But this is America, where disagreement is a matter of principle. We are not the only country so afflicted, but we certainly stand out as one of the most divided and argumentative. It used to be seen as a source of synergy, but it is now -- and really always has been -- indicative of an ongoing war to control the entire country. Are we peaceful or warlike? Do we celebrate our diversity or aspire to be a pure white nation of heteronormative Christians and nothing else?
That's a lot of shit to lay on your trip to the grocery store, but that's where we are. If you go out in public these days, you have to worry not only about all the details of hygiene to avoid accidental contamination, but about the mouth-breathing antagonists who will surround you.
Some places are better than others. Some places are better at different times than others. Manly enclaves like stores where you buy hardware and auto parts are liable to be full of unmasked people forcing you to live at their level of risk tolerance.
People don't understand masks. It's not body armor. It's a condom for your breath. That analogy doesn't hold up perfectly, because a condom guards against infection equally in both directions, when properly used, whereas a mask mostly blocks outgoing breath droplets -- less than perfectly, I admit -- better than it blocks incoming hostile fire from the lung contents of naked-faced freedom fighters who might or might not be actively aggressive on top of their basic selfish, sociopathic unconcern.
I have to go to the grocery store tomorrow. I would also like to pick up a few items at the hardware store, but I don't look forward to wondering how I will be received with my facial covering. This inclines me to choose the store that advertises their precautions as a selling point, rather than one where they obviously don't care.
We all wonder who will turn out to have been right in their approach. You'd think that having the highest infection numbers in the world would have begun to answer that, but the proponents of mass death are counting on the fact that the survivors will get over any grievances once they realize that what's done is done, and that they might as well accept the losses and move on. People are resilient. If you're still capable of enjoying life at all, you'll learn to do it without any friends and family members who succumbed to the plague. Take the hard hit and power through.
Occasionally you hear of a lockdown protester who then got the disease and had a change of heart, but in a country of 330 million people, 80 or 90 thousand dead doesn't distribute corpses widely enough to get the attention of most of us. It's all theoretical. And most people survive, some with few or no symptoms, at least in the short run.
All we've had is the short run. Scientists are studying the problem from every angle, learning as much as they can, but it's a new condition for our species. We don't know long term effects because no one has had a long term yet. Thanks to the rebellious mouth breathers, thousands of us won't get one, either. Who will it be? How much will you care when it's you or someone close to you? Tune in next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, for many, many more weeks, to find out.
