A trumpian Plague of Madness

Let's open with a photo taken of a recent protest organized around "re-opening" the states while in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It comes from this article of The Columbus Dispatch, the photo is from Joshua A Bickel:

taken by Joshua A. Bickel

If it looks like a photo from the Zombie Apocalypse, it's because we're kind of living through a Real-Life version of one. NOTE: Zombie movies have long been a stand-in for a lot of cultural fears, one of which is the rapid spread of infection. The CDC and other pandemic experts use the "threat" of film zombies to model out how those things can happen for real. And now we're seeing it ourselves.

What do you see, really, in that photo?

I see a bunch of privileged, angry White folk screaming about "their rights" and a desire to have all the businesses and places shut down by the Coronavirus to re-open to serve "their" needs at the expense of everybody else.

It's been a month - ever since March 16 when trump FINALLY gave in to the medical reports that COVID was here and was killing Americans - and all of the MAGA-hat angry people are marching for... "Freedom"?

Freedom to get the virus from other people? Freedom to ignore the social distancing to reduce the risks? Freedom to pass that virus on to others, sending yourself and others to overwhelmed hospitals that STILL are not getting the supplies they need to SAVE LIVES?

This is less a "bite-your-arm turn-into-a-ghoul" type of horror movie and more "a plague of madness" spread by ideology, by this "Don't Tread On Me" libertarian-esque mindset that one's individual rights supersedes everyone else's right to NOT GET SICK.

These recent marches by the Confederate-flag waving rage-driven trumpian voters in many of these states are being pushed by trump and Fox Not-News as both a distraction and a rally cry to their hard-core audience. Take a count of how many of these marches are being done in states with Democratic governors, in an attempt to make those governors seem tyrannical and evil. This isn't about freedom, this is about making Democrats look bad.

And in the process, they're getting more people exposed, not just the protesters themselves but the police who have to patrol these marches, the reporters covering them for stories, any employees and workers there at the state capitals or anybody they meet along the way.

We are getting to the point of the pandemic where the backlash by the naysayers and non-believers - a lot of them having lived in their own physical bubbles for years - are kicking into high gear, all because they haven't been infected (yet) or care about any of the ones who HAVE been infected.

These protesters are basically a bunch of privileged citizens who are more annoyed by the discomfort the lack of public services they're used to having - fancy restaurants, vacation spots, easy travel across the planet - and are now screaming bloody murder to get that all back.

Never mind the costs of what they want, which have already been paid by thousands of low-wage employees who provided those services for years, many of them now sick and dead by exposure to COVID and many more of them threatened with exposure should they ever be forced back to work. Which isn't screaming bloody murder, it IS bloody murder.

Gods help them, those low-wage Americans, because they're being burdened with the demands of the unhappy and unreasonable Far Right cult of death.