AMERICA THE STUPID?

 Calling someone who disagrees with you politically "stupid" is an easy trap to fall in for both sides of the political fence.  As a progressive, I try to choose my words carefully, realizing that lapsing into childish name calling doesn't change any minds or do any good.  After all, there are smart people on both sides.

And yet, what is happening in red state America right now appears to be, well, downright stupid.  In the past few months, four different right wing talk show hosts who ridiculed vaccines have died from Covid-19.  While I feel sad for their friends and family, it is hard to mourn someone who so clearly had a way to avoid death and openly, proudly, chose to ignore it.  And the fact that all of these men had a media influence that they used to promote dangerous lies about vaccinations, which has surely led to the loss of other lives, makes them even less sympathetic.  And yes, stupid.

And the stupidity continues: right now in red states there has been a rash of people taking the drug Ivermectin in a misguided belief that it can effectively defeat the covid virus.  There is not one study that shows  this to be the case, but because the drug has been mentioned positively by right wing Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, their followers  have started taking the drug, which is normally used for deworming horses.  It's gotten so bad that the drug has run out in some places, with prescriptions numbering in the thousands and calls to poison control centers from people who have taken the drug skyrocketing.  There's a word for people who reject a vaccination that is the product of months of intensive research and testing, and which has been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration, to instead take a  horse dewormer because their science denying heroes have recommended it.  That word is stupid.

And then there's the school board meetings.  Somehow, the common sense precaution of having children who are too young to get vaccinated wear masks at school has become a political issue.  Board meetings to discuss the matter have often degenerated into screaming matches and death threats.  As someone who has worn a mask quite a bit in the past year myself, I can't possibly see how something as simple as a cloth face covering has become an object of such anger.  I've never seen anyone get angry about  restaurants that enforces a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policy.  Because that would be stupid.  

The American stupid response to the pandemic is utterly depressing when contrasted with the rest of the world: the official statistics show that in raw numbers the US leads the world in Covid cases by millions, and in deaths by tens of thousands.  Even when adjusted to a per capita basis, the country does poorly.  Even worse, our rate of fully vaccinated people lags behind nearly every other first world country, and the number of people getting vaccinated daily has lately been stuck at only around a million, a far cry from the over three million per day rate that occurred back in April.  And according to a July Forbes poll, around forty percent of Republicans plan to never get vaccinated, needlessly prolonging the pandemic because they are too stubborn to do the right thing to protect themselves and others around them.  Stubborn and stupid.  

This is certainly not the first time that conservatives in this country have believed in a stupid thing: during the presidency of Barack Obama, large numbers of Republicans doubted his birthplace.  A majority of Republicans currently believe that Donald Trump won the twenty twenty election.  But these beliefs are mostly harmless ones that are more about a desired belief than a strongly held one.  Vaccine denial is entirely different and deadly.  As America weathers our fourth wave of the virus, with hospitals overflowing and death counts rising, it's hard not to get angry at the proudly unvaccinated people that are still spreading the virus.  The proudly unvaccinated and stupid.