Because everything in the United States has to turn into a stupid argument if not an outright gunfight, response to the global pandemic has been no exception, including the brandishing of firearms as the proponents of liberty bellow their defiance. Sides have been chosen all over the world. The US is not the only place in which oppositional defiance and paranoia have hampered perfectly reasonable procedures to restrict the spread of a new and contagious disease that can kill people fairly readily.
None of this is news to anyone who has not been in a coma for the past year. With every piece of good news about containment and prevention of Covid-19 comes a volley back about how the disease isn't serious, how the dead we're losing are just old people who would die soon anyway, how the disease itself -- though not serious -- was created in a Chinese lab as an attack on America, or possibly commissioned by the Deep State to help enslave ordinary citizens, and how the vaccine is in various ways tainted.
Live free or die. The sentiment is hardly limited to New Hampshire, where adherence to disease precautions has been average or better. But it perfectly describes how the heroes of the biological warfare insurrection view their cause. They bravely risk getting the sniffles to prove to the cowardly mask wearers that life is to be lived and death is to be embraced. And occasionally one of them gets very sick. Some die. Heroes all.
The rest of the quote from General John Stark is that death is not the worst of evils. Death isn't the only consequence of Covid-19. Some people suffer long-term ill effects. But the dead and the long-haulers are still in the minority. Most who get the disease and survive have their story to tell, about barely being sick, or feeling like they had a nasty flu, or even being so trampled that they had trouble drawing a full breath, and lay in delirious fevers for days. That's if they didn't have to be hospitalized. But if they survived and recovered, clearly there was nothing to worry about. And now they're immune, right? Problem solved. Challenge faced and overcome. That which did not kill them not only made them stronger, it confirmed them in their arrogance.
Once in a while you hear of one who repented and bore witness to the world that they were wrong, and that we should take this disease seriously. Wimps. Softies. When this is all over in a few months we'll all be drinking and laughing together about how so many people got duped into wearing masks and getting vaccinated with some pharmaceutical company's experimental drug, while the brave and proud remained valorous and philosophically pure. And had fun.
A half a million dead is a tiny fraction of the total population of the United States. This will be swept aside by the return of mass entertainment and the distractions of political theater.
