“Willed Helplessness Is the American Condition” (The Atlantic, August 4, 2022, by Meghan O’Rourke, the editor of The Yale Review):
If a pandemic is a lens onto how we understand our moral responsibility to the community, this moment of risk discourse is revealing that we don’t care about one another very much. … On the day last spring that a federal judge ruled against the CDC’s mask mandates on public transportation, I got tangled up trying to adjust my son’s mask before entering his kindergarten, the chill air biting my fingers.
Deplorable behavior is everywhere, even in states that are free of Deplorables:
In the third year of the coronavirus pandemic, we as a nation have largely resumed life as normal: We’ve dropped mask mandates, made information about case rates harder to access, adopted the sunny view that Omicron is “mild.”
I have noticed this as well. Facebookers who spent more than two years demanding that others wear masks, hate Trump, accept the Sacrament of Fauci (4 shots minimum!), etc. now post pictures of themselves, unmasked, in jammed airliners on the way to domestic and international vacations (i.e., purely optional trips). Why didn’t they stay home or take a car-based trip with contactless hotel check-in and drive-through food if they consider stopping the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to be a moral duty?
This is not the Yale-based laptopper’s first encounter with a debilitating long-term mysterious ailment:
I had a condition that closely resembled long COVID for more than a decade, a result of untreated Lyme disease. It manifested as brain fog, fatigue, dizziness, and the kind of dysfunction of the nervous system that COVID-19 can trigger.
How many of us are the walking wounded?
In May, the CDC released a study suggesting that nearly one in five people ages 18 to 64 who contract COVID-19 may develop long COVID. That suggests that currently 7.5 percent of American adults are living with ongoing effects of COVID. A March report from the Government Accountability Office found that up to 23 million Americans had developed long COVID.
(Maybe the answer is to move to Florida? All of our neighbors, when asked, report having had COVID-19. None complain of any symptoms that lasted beyond 10 days.)
What is the solution to a terrible situation that has developed in states that lived under mask and vaccine orders for more than two years? More mask orders and vaccine shots:
At the very least, we could implement mask mandates when cases rise and prioritize safer air in public buildings and public transportation. (Personally, I think we should all be wearing masks on public transportation until we’ve got a firmer grasp on long COVID.) We could put more resources into booster campaigns and help people stay informed about caseloads so that they can make informed decisions about risk. As a nation, we ought to acknowledge the scope of long COVID and grapple with the social consequences of a mass-disabling or mass-deterioration event, as Ben Mazer has called it in this magazine.
Let’s have a look at the author’s Twitter feed. She seems to have traveled to France recently. The best way to avoid COVID-19 is to be one of 350 people crammed into an Airbus fuselage?
Back in June, the author noted that the best way to avoid COVID-19 is to be the subject of abortion care at 24 weeks:
(Why is it “women” who receive abortion care?)
Mx. O’Rourke demonstrates a keen grasp of Constitutional law:
(The commenters do not point out that there is nothing in the Constitution corresponding to the Second Amendment that has been such a bitter disappointment to those who follow Science and, therefore, gun ownership and the provision of abortion care to pregnant people are not comparably situated in the split between federal and state law.)
I think the laptop class should lay off their confused comparisons because I know someone close to me who actually *did* and *does* have Lyme disease – caught through multiple deer tick bites, and there are only a few doctors in the country who treat it effectively. It requires very large doses of an antibiotic cocktail and if anyone would like to know how I know, philg can put you in touch with me.
They have zero to do with each other – vector, symptoms, treatment, nothing. It’s astonishing to hear how dumb this woman sounds, given her status, but hey – victims gotta be victims.
I guess nobody at Yale remembers Bork any longer. Self-selection in action!
https://youtu.be/bRkhBav4ekA?t=616
Also: If this Alpha Plus intellectual from Yale suffered from “untreated” Lyme disease for so long, did she ever ask herself how she got it? And why was she stupid enough to let go untreated for so long? My Epsilon Minus Semimoron relative was able to find effective treatment. Maybe she should consider not listening to anyone at Yale.
If she suffered for so long from “brain fog” how the heck did she become the editor of the Yale Law Review? Did she have a side job as a stripper? I thought those people are supposed to be top-notch, razor-sharp folks with brains like Katana swords.
Of course you’re correct in terms of the Constitutional law on the 2nd Amendment when compared to abortion:
The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution says what it says and the Heller decision guaranteed that it would apply in all 50 states. Some of those states have legislatures which try every time they meet to chip away at the 2nd Amendment, right up to – and often past – the limit of their authority, and other people have tried to float the idea of nullifying or removing it through the process amending the Constitution. In the first instance those cases go to court and depending on the skill and amount of money available to the lawyers involved, some win and some lose.
Abortion, however, was never a Constitutional right but was essentially “declared” to be one through a process of legal reasoning that can best be described as: “WTF?”
Allegedly intelligent people like this one continue in their attempts to confuse the two. As she has said herself, she suffered from a decade of “brain fog.” That’s why Yale graduates get the big bucks.
To my mind, it’s like this: The right to keep and bear arms in in the Constitution and the right to an abortion is not and never was. The people at Yale and Harvard have been trying their best for the past 40 years or so to convince the dummies that it’s just the opposite, but they’re wrong.
Sorry for the typos; I don’t have a paid editor and I wasn’t using Notepad++ on this one.
The situation is the same in Europe. We had EUR 15,000 fines in Austria for the unclean (why doesn’t Meghan O’Rourke move to Austria?). We nearly had the same in Germany, but events like the Canadian Trucker Protests, the Supreme Court “vaccine” verdict and the Ukraine war made it harder to follow through.
Now there is a complete reversal. No more mask orders in supermarkets, no “vaccine” mandates. About 10% of people voluntarily wear masks in supermarkets. No one keeps any distance anymore.
But if you mention that the situation is largely the same as last year, you are still a heretic. If you mention online that people like philg have been advocating the current policies for more than two years (and were right), the messages get deleted and censored.
I’m beginning to view most people as mindless programmable computers who regurgitate sentence fragments they read, not unlike GPT-3. If the NYT and the Atlantic push the flat earth model for a year, people will believe it and you’ll get censored on Facebook if you say the earth is a sphere.
“I think we should all be wearing masks on public transportation”
From what I see on the news and dozens of YouTube videos, the real danger of traveling via public transportation is not from catching Covid but rather physical assaults from the other travelers.
Phil, I’m surprised you’ve not had more interactions with severe covid sufferers. Reading this blog it seems like you know and talk to a lot more people than I do. Yet I have know two people (both in their 60s) who died from Covid in the pre-vax phase of the pandemic, and one good friend in his 40s who lost his sense of taste when he got infected a few months ago and has still not gotten it back. To give you a sense of the size of my social circles, in the same time I’ve known 3 people who died of cancer: two guys in their 60s who had been battling for years, and a 40 year old who did within a month of his diagnosis. There’s a lot to be said for the ways hospitals treated non-covid patients during the pandemic, but it’s not often talked about. One of these guys had their treatments suspended at the start of the pandemic and I believe it hastened their death. And the 40 year old’s family was not permitted to visit him while he was in the hospital due to pandemic-related restrictions, which seems pretty cruel to me.
I can’t think of anyone that I’ve known who has died from or even with COVID-19. My own father died shortly after getting Pfizer shot #2. I have had friends or acquaintances say that a parent has died from COVID-19. All of these examples were people in their 80s or 90s living in nursing homes in MA or NY. I heard about a heavy aircraft mechanic in his 50s or 60s, if memory serves, who died of COVID-19, but, again, this guy was a colleague of a friend, not someone I had ever talked to.
“Facebookers who spent more than two years demanding that others wear masks, hate Trump, accept the Sacrament of Fauci (4 shots minimum!), etc. now post pictures of themselves, unmasked, in jammed airliners on the way to domestic and international vacations (i.e., purely optional trips). Why didn’t they stay home or take a car-based trip with contactless hotel check-in and drive-through food if they consider stopping the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to be a moral duty? ”
Preach it Philg!! Sending the kids to summer camps sound s familiar among the hypocrites of Facebook i am connected with.What happened to all the concern?