The question of how you’d be judged regarding the vulnerable prior to COVID19 wasn’t directed at you, but since you answered...
Again, the Body Kount Klub is only cares to focus on one side of the story. There are plenty of “feeble” who are negatively being impacted by this thing who will _never_ contract the virus. If we’re going to throw around statements regarding our (my word) compassion for the feeble due to the virus, ya God damn better well have been throwing in to help the feeble before this... and if not, certainly after.
It’s maddening that so many — ON BOTH SIDES OF THE DISCUSSION — chose to not acknowledge the other side. I’m pointing my fingers at both sides. Solving for one issue at the expense of those who are impacted by the other is at best selfish and at worst has the potential to be of greater overall harm to all of us.
As a society, we have long needed to improve our care and respect for the elderly and feeble.
If the goal is to skewer hypocrisy, then sure, let's evaluate each other, like your "better have" measurement, or
@BuckeyeNation27 's callback. Let's measure everyone's contributions and compare them to their accusations. Looking for worthy humans is going to be a pretty fruitless quest, unless the harvest is intended to be rotten. I'm no stranger to such harvests.
Or we can consider all sides, like you're also suggesting. We can weigh the incomplete data, the educated but partial projections, the evolving understanding. The widespread and complicated implications of the pandemic as well as the restrictions, and doing our best to separate our emotional distortion and reshuffling of the data.
As humans, we revert back to our weaknesses very quickly, and pointing fingers is a beloved coping mechanism.
I need constant recalibration on this topic, and frankly wake up each day in wildly different places.
For me, I tend to believe the seriousness being suggested by the media. I'm more sensitive to those misrepresenting the breadth and legitimacy of the threat, and more incensed by rhetoric that furthers that. I leaned more towards the severity of it, and thus am similarly not as offended by diagnoses of covid without a test, or evolving models and data that shifts the projections. I tend to focus more on those who downplay or belittle the threat, as I am an emotional human being with inconsistent sensitivities, and need to be less that way
Others come at this from the opposite side, feeling this isn't as serious as the media says. The dismissals of the threat were reasonable, the restrictions were extreme and destructive, and are more incensed by people misrepresenting and overselling the severity of the disease. They may feel the broader financial instability and threat is larger than the scope of the disease, even if they feel it's a legitimate threat. They are focused on those who make it seem worse than it is, and those are the destroyers and biggest threats.
The truth, like always, lies in the middle. Restoration comes from listening to and serving both. From realizing both sides are reeling and devastated.
It's easy to focus on those who exaggerate or don't take our side seriously, but all of those threats are not going away. Even if extreme lockdowns were not taken, our industries and economies would have been devastated. Even if we all assumed or adopted very wary viewpoints of the disease and isolated better, it still would have been clouded in the fog of newness, spreading and threatening without remedy or prevention. Both of those will remain the case as we reopen.
