Hi, everyone. Gideon here—again—to come down from the Golden Pedestal and talk about whatever’s on my mind. You may have noticed that I don’t really bring up current events often. The reason is that (while it pains me to admit out loud,) my opinions, while super amazing, and you should all listen to them, are just that; they’re opinions, and we could use a lot more facts than opinions in these unusual times. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of facts for you. The world is a confused place, and I’m confused right along with it. Hell, by the time I’m done typing this, or even tomorrow, some new fact may come out to change my opinion, and all this time typing will have been wasted. Who knows?
For the sake of posterity, let’s start with a little recap of the world right now, and then take a look at the world through my personal lens. The biggest thing going on in the world is COVID-19, AKA “The Coronavirus.” It’s a respiratory disease that has erupted throughout the world, and America has been hit the hardest of every other nation in the world, because our leadership has been grossly incompetent in handling and preparing for a pandemic they were warned about long in advance.
It doesn’t seem to be killing the young, but it is VERY good at killing old people, black people, and other POC’s. At the time of writing this, there are 2,564,190 cases throughout the world. 824,698 of those cases are in America. The world’s death toll from this virus is 177,424. Of those, 45,297 are in the United States, where your favorite narcissistic blogger/writer lives.
Author’s Note: I’m assuming that’s me. If it’s not, that’s OK; you can get the fuck out until your tastes improve. (I’m only kidding. Never leave me. …But stay six feet away at all times.)
So, yet again, America is number one! …Even when it comes to incompetence, rising death tolls, ignorance in the face of science, and general stupidity. Chant with me now: “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”
The world has been shut down almost completely since… mid-February, I want to say? It’s hard to remember off-hand. The days bleed together lately. Businesses labeled as “non-essential” have been forcibly shut down. People are being ordered to stay home, to help reduce the spread of the disease. Lots of people are now unemployed, because what businesses are going to keep paying staff when there’s no work or profits rolling in? Not many. (Believe it or not, there are a small few, but not many.)
One of our best steps to fighting it has been dubbed “Social Distancing.” People who have to go out are trying to maintain a six-foot distance between each other. (Or two meters, for you metric folks in LITERALLY EVERY COUNTRY OTHER THAN MINE.) China’s streets are empty. Think about that—CHINA. The country that makes most of everything in the world, including people. Entire cities are skeletons of what they were. The Las Vegas strip was shut down. All the hotels, casinos, tourist attractions, and general crowds Vegas is famous for are all gone, boarded up, and barely lit. A few signs stay lit up on the strip reminding customers to return once they’re open again, whenever that may be. Sometimes, it feels like a post-apocalypse story’s boring flashback about “how it all started.”
That means products aren’t being as mass produced. It means that people aren’t roaming the streets in their cars, which means they aren’t buying gas. They aren’t polluting nearly as much as they were, which is nice, and the prices for gas are sitting in my neighborhood somewhere around $2.35/gallon. Factories that aren’t producing useful products are shutting down. The hole in our ozone layer has gotten smaller, and LA has seen the clearest skies it’s had in recent history.
…It’s a mixed bag of good and bad, is what I’m saying.
Things are very surreal right now. Since TV shows can’t be produced in the same way as they were, (Social Distancing!) people are realizing that celebrities are very weird, but also very much human, like the rest of us. Lots of live shows are being produced out of people’s homes now. Never really cared what Jimmy Kimmel’s house looked like before, but now I know anyway. Some celebrities are donating their fortunes to help the downtrodden, and some are getting together online for a sing-along of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” in a very tone-deaf attempt at showing solidarity.
Author’s Note: Sorry, guys—I know you were trying to help, but when you sing to a world of people stuck in their one-and-two-bedroom homes who have to battle psychos at the grocery store for toilet paper, while you’re all in multi-bedroom mansions with pools, tennis courts, and in-home gymnasiums, it feels like you should shut the fuck up.
One of the biggest things we’re realizing here in the good ol’ “US-Of-Plague” is that we can run a LOT of things without decent leadership than we thought we could. A lot of cities and states are being treated like they’re on their own. Political leaders literally told states that the national stockpile of medical supplies was not ours, but theirs. Now, I’m no political scientist, but the United States Government isn’t an “ours and theirs” setup. We’re all supposed to be the same nation, united we stand, and all that bullshit we have songs about.
People are mask-crazy. Those little paper masks that are basically no better than a hands-free way of sneezing into your elbow are now treasured, much-needed resources for our medical workers. The CDC and the WHO are saying masks should be worn ONLY if you have symptoms, or are treating someone with symptoms, but that’s it. However, nobody knows who to believe right now, so they’re all erring on the side of caution, like frightened people do.
My day job insists we wear them too, regardless of the fact that I work in an office with no access to the public, and none of us have symptoms. Some of us may be asymptomatic carriers, I guess, but that’s where the grey area makes things hard for people to make rational, intelligent decisions.
Author’s Note: At one point, my company was having a VERY tasteless promotion where customers could win TWO whole paper masks! That’s right: two single-use, hoarded-like-gold paper masks. It was the most shameless, despicable, tone-deaf attempt to profit from a disaster that I’d yet seen. Jaws dropped around my office, and the promotion was quickly pulled, I believe.
Some of the other things this disease did was shine a big fucking spotlight on the problems inherent in our system. Capitalism doesn’t work. Employees who were deemed “essential,” and allowed to continue working their jobs are being told they are “heroes.” These are people who work in food service, medical treatment, grocery stores, etc. They all came to realize that they ARE essential, and not the minimum-wage bottom-feeders they’ve been treated as their whole lives. What little bit of society that hasn’t gone dead is resting on the shoulders of people that the upper class would have spit on for a dollar two months ago. Companies and billionaires are realizing this now. But, instead of raising their pay to meet the rockstar-levels they obviously deserve, these money-hungry companies are paying money to make commercials calling them heroes.
They aren’t heroes, they are hostages. They don’t dare stop working in a world where jobs are literally vanishing. People can’t pay their rent right now. They don’t know where their food is coming from next. The unemployment lines are so overwhelmed, people can’t submit their claims, because they can’t get through.
Through all of this, there has been one clear, straightforward message: STAY HOME. YOU ARE SAVING LIVES BY STAYING HOME. DO NOT SOCIALIZE UNTIL WE GET THIS UNDER CONTROL.
However, people can’t even manage to do that. The other day, we had right-wing morons protesting the “stay at home” orders. They PROTESTED that they should be able to go out and do whatever they want. It’s their body, and their choice. (These are the same people who protest abortion clinics, ironically.) The problem is that it’s NOT just their bodies, it’s the bodies of everyone they come in contact with, because this shit is CONTAGIOUS, and you might not have symptoms, while still having the virus.
…You know what? I’m fine with those people getting together in large groups. Maybe they’ll all get it, drop dead, and rid the world of a few more idiots. Okay, that sounded a little harsh, but it’s going to lead me to another harsh point.
WARNING:
Those of you who are still reeling from personal losses at the hands of this horrific outbreak
may want to stop reading at this point, because you’re probably not going to like what I have to say next.
Enjoy the rest of your day, and come back for my next post, if you are so inclined.
I’ll wait.
Go ahead, those of you who aren’t sticking around… scooch. We’ll talk later.
Okay. So, now that they’re gone, I’m going to come out and say it: Death is tragic, but this virus has done a LOT of good things for the world. It has forced us to stop and take stock of what’s important. We’ve seen the positive effects on our habitat by the forced removal of the human beings running around spewing waste and pollution all over. We need this virus to go away, but in the meantime, maybe we should let it do its thing; like getting out of the way of an elephant stampede, and restructuring the village with what’s left after.
I know it sounds monstrous, be we could use a lot less people in this world, and yes—I’m including myself in that assessment of the world. If I die to make the world a better place, so be it. Obviously, I don’t want it to go that way—I hope we can figure out a way to fix the glaring problems this virus has taught us without more deaths; but if it does run its course, and our world is radically altered by this globally eye-opening plague, I have one word for that:
GOOD.
We now know our existing systems don’t work. Our US system of healthcare is too expensive for anyone to get help, our rate of polluting the world has us hurtling toward a literal climate disaster, we have a poverty problem, we had too many damned people running around the world, and driving everywhere they went, and simply wrecking everything, as humans do: consuming, wasting, polluting; lather, rinse, repeat. We didn’t want to be inconvenienced, we didn’t want to think about it. But honestly, our longest-held most money-hungry institutions need to burn down to the fucking ground so we can build something better and more sustainable on top of the ashes.
One of the biggest arguments against this line of thinking is the death toll. I constantly hear, “Yes, but people are dying, Gideon. The numbers will only go up before they come back down again. Lots more people will die!” To that, I ask this very hard question:
“…And?“
I’m not trying to sound like a heartless super villain here, but seriously—aside from the counter-argument that “death is sad, and I don’t want people I love to die,” so fucking what? A big percentage of old people we care about might die? Well guess what—old people already fucking do that.
Author’s Note: Spoiler Alert; we all do that at some point; even narcissistic people like me, who actually want to live forever.
The people in power are almost entirely my generation and up. This virus is practically going out of its way to knock off the people selfishly obstructing progress for their own ends. The bureaucrats and billionaires and oil barons can all go, as far as progress is concerned. This virus is taking them down a piece at a time already, without killing them, and the old people we’re most worried about are already not far from being hurled from this mortal coil as it is. Maybe I’m heartless, but to me, “Grandma gets a year or two longer than she would have,” pales in comparison to “We finally moved away from fossil fuels into renewable energies for the rest of the planet.”
Think of those career politicians without term limits who make it their livelihoods to do what is best for their political friends who are in power now; who use their positions to obstruct positive change, and run everything into the ground just to keep their money and power. You’ve got a term limit now, buddy—and it’s called COVID 19. Let’s get a few Millennials in there to try and pump the brakes and fix the planet you’ve been fucking up for them. We have to hand the world over to them at some point, anyway. I say we do it now, by sweeping the ashes of the dead out of the chair, and sitting the new guy in it. “Welcome aboard, kid. Here’s your planet. Sorry it took so long for the last guy to drop dead and hand it over.”
Think of depopulation. Think of the environment. It’s notably better throughout the world right now, and that’s just from people staying home. What if we could have that all the time, without the risk of it being fucked up when a band of protesting morons say they reserve the right to have a tire fire at their local strip mall in groups of a hundred people, because they’re free to do whatever the fuck they want?
On an admittedly morbid note, think of the improvements to healthcare we could have, if we were forced to take a hard look at the current American healthcare system which got so overwhelmed we were wiped out in large percentages; many of those who died could be those commercial-praised, hard-working, underpaid, everyday “heroes” who couldn’t afford the insane costs of medical treatment.
Humans have demonstrated without fail that they will choose convenience and greed over hard choices and equality. They don’t WANT change, because it’s hard and scary. But, we’re at the point where change needs to be forced upon us. We CANNOT go back to the way the world was before this pandemic. It was a speeding roller-coaster, running at top speed, downhill, toward a brick wall. We all knew it, and nobody wanted to do anything difficult about it.
Well, guess what? Sometimes, we have to get kicked in the teeth to learn a lesson. I truly believe this virus, (which is tragic, and has killed more people than it should have, to be clear,) is doing us a favor—by taking away our option to make the hard choice, kicking us in the teeth, and saying, “Here’s how things are now. Get your shit together, humanity. Fuck going back to normal; move forward.“
Is it pleasant to think about, or fair? No.
Is it scary? Yes it is.
…Is it necessary?
This guy says, “Absolutely.”
If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to sing “Imagine” off-key to all the people who are
less fortunate than me. So… my neighbor, I guess?