ETHICS: Would You Die For Me?
ETHICS: Would You Die For Me?
Coming to Terms with What COVID Has Laid Bare
It’s a serious question - would you die for me? I’m a stranger on the Internet, that’s obviously a ridiculous ask. Now if a hurt toddler was stuck on railroad tracks as a train was approaching, odds are you would risk your life to try and save them.
Strangers risk their own lives to save others’ lives all the time, it’s a common occurrence in New York City; the good Samaritan who volunteers to put their life on the line in service of someone else they don’t know. Now what if I asked you to die for me - not to save my life, necessarily - but for my own luxury and comfort. If a millionaire white man demanded a poor black boy sacrificed his mother for the benefit of said white man, most reasonable people would find such a request to be outrageous, and quite racist.
And yet, that’s precisely what Joe Biden did to the mother of Shenitha “Angel” Curry of Chicago in September of 2021, on a mad crusade to ram children back into schools during a raging pandemic, with no safety standards or COVID precautions in place. Shenita did her best to keep her child home, but the local government intervened and forced her to send her son into school - who was soon infected, brought the virus home, infected his mother, and she tragically passed away. This is a story that has played out time and time again for hundreds of thousands of American children - as of January of last year, over 200,000 children lost a primary caregiver due to COVID. Many because the child was infected at school and brought the virus home to infect their parents. Recently, we recorded our 2,000th pediatric COVID death. Thousands of dead children, hundreds of thousands of orphaned children - all of them victims.
Shenitha’s son will have to struggle for the rest of his life without a mother, and the guilt and shame of having played a major role in her death. What none of these pro-COVID plague rats who insist that repeatedly infecting children (and their families) admit is that a dead child can never graduate from college, and the death of a primary caregiver is one of the leading contributors to a child’s academic struggles. On top of this, over half a million of children in America are currently suffering from Long COVID, which includes symptoms such as cognitive and neurological disabilities.
A lot of children have paid a horrific price for America to go “back to normal.” No masks, no quarantine, no mandates - anything. Brunch is back! Sure, thousands are dying and being crippled every week, but I can go to Applebees and get unlimited appetizers! Many more children will pay a horrific price for these shallow comforts, but damn if these fresh-frozen boneless buffalo wings don’t hit the spot!
It’s not just children paying the price, either. Two years ago in January of 2021, we knew that line cooks were the profession at the highest risk of dying from COVID. The deaths have been disproportionately ending black and brown lives, due to being disproportionately working class. The conservative think tank known as the “Brookings Institute” now estimates that over 4 million Americans are too disabled by COVID to work anymore, with over 20 million Americans suffering from Long COVID symptoms. We’ve forced an incredible burden onto our fellow Americans, and that burden will continue to grow exponentially if we fail to reduce transmission of the virus - including the amputation of limbs, ending one model's career. Many careers have been wrecked by COVID, including that of top sports stars such as LPGA star Nellie Korda, cyclist Peter Sagan, hockey player Brandon Sutter, and basketball player Jayson Tatum. Here’s an Instagram post from 21-year-old tennis star Tanysha Dissanayake:
“Back to normal,” indeed. People in pristine health having their careers and dreams ended by COVID, stripped of their freedom and liberty. Disabled and vulnerable people realizing the rest of society is actively hostile to them and their needs. This is the start of a long and painful road you do not want to see the end of.
So, I ask you again - would you be willing to sentence a member of your family to death for my luxury and comfort? Would you let me hack off your arms and legs if I thought it would bring me some temporary satisfaction? Would you allow me to take a hammer to your knees, cripple you, and end your career for my own short-term gain?
Nearly every single casualty - death and disability - of the ongoing COVID pandemic in America was infected by their fellow countryman - whether it was a child who was forcibly infected at school, a waiter forced to work while infectious, a restaurant patron who knew they were infectious and simply didn’t care about infecting others with a deadly and disabling virus that attacks every organ in the body, a family member who didn’t bother testing before attending a family gathering, a colleague who attended a professional conference whilst infectious and didn’t want to miss out… the examples go on and on and on.
Our political & economic leaders demanded this of our fellow citizens, and are demanding it of us now, with no end to the pandemic in sight. To sacrifice our health and our lives for short-term gains, whether it be political messaging where Biden declares that he’s “stopped thinking about [COVID],” or short term economic gains that crumble as more and more people are driven out of the workforce by COVID. But how do these leaders, who demand you and your family be repeatedly infected by COVID, gather? Certainly with zero precautions, right? Just the flu, bro!
Awh, wait. Damn. Instead of mandating these safety precautions in public spaces, especially schools, America’s political leaders, under a Democrat Presidency elected with a mandate to take COVID seriously, insisted on forcing a massive viral burden on the working people of America. There has been coordinated messaging through the media that actually, it’s totally fine to be repeatedly infected with COVID, and it’s little more than an “inevitable seasonal yuck,” as written by Emma Green in the New Yorker when lazily smearing the People’s CDC. Emma is not a medical expert in any form, and literally every word in that phrase is an incorrect application when describing COVID. The Death Panel podcast dismantles Emma’s slop here.
So much of the pro-COVID spectrum, from rightoids to liberals to even some self-proclaimed “socialists,” have doubled down on the ideal that they lack any sort of responsibility to protect the health of their fellow countrymen, demonstrating a willingness to play a part in demanding the suffering, permanent harm, and deaths of others - a deranged perversion of Reagan-esque individualism, demanding others suffer, become disabled, and die - not just quietly, but with a smile on their face.
A society that fails to protect others, especially our most vulnerable, especially through a national disaster such as an ongoing pandemic, is a society that is on the road to collapse. The fact that we as a nation have become so comfortable with demanding others suffer and die for our own luxury and comfort is an incredibly scary place to be in America.