(Editor’s Note: This is closing on 3000 words and growing, and even the best rants start losing people around the 1500 mark, so I’m chopping it into its component parts. Expect further installments.)
I have evidently been guilty of failing to express myself plainly. To be clear, then: When I say “This is all your fault”, I’m not implying that it might be someone else instead. I blame you.
I’m saying that all this is your fault. You personally. Yes, you, the one reading this right now. I know you don’t believe me, and if you’re starting to… no, it’s too farfetched, and you just think I’m nuts. Too damn bad, because it’s all your fault. You’re the one who made the decisions that put us where we are today.
Oh, sure, you had some help. It was you (plus several million of your closest friends) who spread all those fake memes on Facebook back in 2016. You Liked them and Shared them, no matter that they were transparent falsehoods. Blame Russia all you like for lying to you, but nothing will change the fact that it was you that believed them without even bothering to check because they said something you wanted to be true. It was all you.
I know this because a couple of them even caught me, and I check these things as a matter of course. Don’t think for a second that makes you one whit less culpable; there’s plenty of blame to go around even after I accept my fair share — and I’ve been working to debunk them ever since. (Thanks for contributing, by the way.)
You’d think you’d have learned your lesson by now. It’s not like “Russia screwed with our last election” is startling news; we’ve known it for years. And yet, you’re still doing the same thing today — and in such originally brain-dead idiotic ways that it boggles the mind.
Here’s one example: A meme goes around saying that we’ve wasted three months of isolation; because some people refused to wear masks, now the country’s right back where it started. You feel the anger; you react with one emote or another; you Share it. And you prove yourself to be the sort of unmitigated dumbass who wants Russia to pick your next president.
Because, first and foremost, it’s not true: We’re not where we were three months ago. Thanks to social distancers and mask-wearers, we’re three months closer to a vaccine, or a treatment protocol, or the virus mutating to a less deadly strain. We spent three months without our hospitals getting overloaded. Against a virus that spreads asymptomatically, that’s an amazing win, and it was achieved at vast cost and great sacrifice, so don’t knock it.
Second, it’s not the millions of people in states that had no infection who are at fault even if they didn’t wear masks; the uninfected didn’t spread this. It’s the ones who drove from the red zone to the Stage 1 county to get a haircut. It’s the jackass in the WalMart screaming at the manager about having to wear a mask, all the while spraying infection along with spittle from that gaping hole in the front of his face.
But most of all, it’s a quasi-airborne virus that spreads almost asymptomatically, and our society has “essential employees” who are out there keeping us fed. If you think there’s any way for a nation with cities this crowded to wipe it out entirely just by having about half the people stay home, you’re deluded.
The goal was always to buy time — and we did.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m not even going to touch on the anti-mask memes. I already wrote that piece. Read it, wear a damn mask, and stop being a dumbass already.
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