I knew this would happen. The death toll for COVID-19 in the US has exceeded one million. If this were a nuclear war we’d call it a megadeath. Maybe we should anyway, since indifference and outright malice on the part of right-wing politicians and pundits has driven millions of otherwise sensible Americans to refuse to take measures that would save their lives and those of their families and friends.
We’ve seen this movie before, you know, but it’s not like the lives of queer men ever mattered much in this shithole of a country.
“Dr. Don Francis: How many dead hemophiliacs do you need? How many people have to die to make it cost efficient for you people to do something about it? A hundred? A thousand? Give us a number so we won’t annoy you again until the amount of money you begin spending on lawsuits makes it more profitable for you to save people then to kill them?”
I’m not happy about any of this, but I’m not in a position to do much about it. I’ve already done what I can; I’m fully vaccinated and I wear masks in public so it’s less likely to happen to me, and I’m less likely to spread it around if I do catch it.
The only other thing I can do is start openly carrying a rifle so that if an unmasked person gets too close to me I can give them an incentive to back the fuck off, but that probably isn’t a good idea. We’ve got too heavily armed assholes walking around in the US already, even if I’d choose a good lever-action over an AR-151.
In the meantime, I think I’ll mark the occasion by putting on some Megadeth and browsing r/HermanCainAward. Why? Because fuck you is why. I’m sick of this shit, and I’d rather see COVID-19 eradicated by vaccination, but if every anti-vaxxer and anti-masker dies of COVID first I suppose I can live with it.
It suggests that Planck’s Principle doesn’t only apply to science.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it…
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97
If the arc of history does indeed bend toward justice, it does so one funeral at a time. This is not an argument for hurrying the process along. If Neil Gaiman is right in depicting Death as a lady, it is rude to rush her. Even if he isn’t, rushing conservative politicians and pundits and those will willingly gulp their Flavor Aid into the arms of their maker is a good way to fuck up one’s own life.
History shows that single angry man with a gun does not a revolution2 make.
A rifle that holds seven rounds should be capable of killing seven fascists before reloading.↩︎
Gavrilo Princip doesn’t count, since he ended up trigging the First World War. Neither does John Wilkes Booth, even if post-Lincoln Republicans gave up on Reconstruction after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.↩︎