Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric. But I hadn’t really fully understood just how horrifying that combination of right-wing extremism, Facebook, and a killer virus was until I became a regular at the Herman Cain Awards subreddit. This series will document some of those stories, so we are aware of what the other side is doing to our country.
Today’s cautionary tale is “Shooter.”
Shooter is so tough. He’s got big assault rifles, high-caliber rounds, a man’s man.
COVID-19 is so fake, everything that is dead is dead from COVID-19, ha ha ha. The deer should’ve worn a mask ha ha ha. Why, Shooter won’t go to the hospital every time he gets a sniffle because he’s a big boy. He can handle the flu just fine without any doctors!
Wait … aren’t these the same people who keep telling us that tens of thousands of people die every year from the flu?
I guess the flu doesn’t affect big boys who can handle sniffles, which are totally the same thing as the flu. And COVID-19.
He ran to the hospital.
Turns out COVID-19 is more than the sniffles. Or the flu.
Blood O2 levels at 67—that was pretty much the game right there.
But I will say, this update just enraged me. He’s got an 11-year-old son who has “medical issues” and has to be home-schooled. He has no health insurance, so now his family is saddled with that. And if he doesn’t have health insurance, he certainly doesn’t have life insurance. And on top of that, he was the family’s sole source of income?
But he was too much of a BIG BOY to take a FREE fucking vaccine that wouldn’t have just protected him, but would’ve protected his family, including his special needs son.
Look, we can all say “fuck Shooter” and be justified a million times over. But his son? His son didn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to grow up in a shattered, debt-saddled family without a dad. He doesn’t deserve the trauma of having to see his father poked through with countless tubes and lines, and only being able to do so with gloved hands. I can’t even fathom the trauma of that. Seriously, fuck Shooter, and not for his noxious politics. Fuck him for failing to be there for his family and his kid, who supposedly meant so much to him.
COVID-19 isn’t a peaceful death. You don’t slip quietly into a coma and drift off into eternal sleep. There’s nothing romantic or poetic about any of this. It’s gruesome, painful, and cruel. Oftentimes, there is a dead-cat bounce right before death, giving everyone a sick jolt of hope. COVID-19 systemically attacks the body, forcing doctors to deal with a cascading set of problems—lungs, of course, but also the heart and kidneys.
That’s why even survivors of serious bouts are left with “long COVID”—a painfully long recovery with chronic maladies like COVID-onset diabetes. We are going to be dealing with the effects of this pandemic for a long, long time. Unfortunately for Shooter’s son, that’s not a problem his father will have.
Part of providing for your family is making sure they’ll be taken care of if something happens to you. That means 1) doing your best to make sure nothing happens to you, and 2) having insurance and savings to protect them just in case. Obviously, people struggle economically, and having money set aside can be tough. On the other hand, that’s an expensive rifle Shooter had there, as is ammunition and range time. It really can depends on priorities, particularly for people like Shooter who vote against a robust social net because of “personal responsibility.”
Well, just like so many gun owners fail “gun safety 101,” Shooter failed “personal responsibility 101,” and his family is left to deal with the consequences. Especially his son. As a father, I’m really feeling anger on behalf of his son.
He didn’t die of a heart attack. He died of COVID-19.
They sanitize it to the very end, all to avoid any personal responsibility.
Shooter made fun of COVID-19 vaccines and refused to take the pandemic seriously. Had he done so, COVID-19 wouldn’t have assaulted his organs until his heart finally gave out.
#FuckCovid, sure.
You know the best way to fuck COVID-19? Vaccinate. That would fuck COVID-19 good. Kill it dead. Stop its spread. Prevent it from taking more of their family and friends.
We have officially lost over 700,000 Americans to this disease. The fact that it continues to kill 2,000 a day despite having a vaccine is an indictment of the conservative anti-science bubble. They are murdering their own. And it would be easy to wipe our hands of it and leave them to their self-destructive ways, except that the longer this virus lingers, the longer we have to deal with masking and other restrictions on regular life (and I sure as hell want to get back to normal), and the more chances the virus has to mutate into a vaccine-proof variant.
That’s why conservatives are committing suicide-by-COVID, and liberals are begging them to stop. Because we can’t get back to normal until they do.
Also, we’re human, and no one wants to see children without their parents, and all for the dumbest reasons possible.