Current Events > I think I'm becoming disillusioned with society in general.

(+) Yeah! (+)

To me, it feels like we're never going to be done with covid.

In early 2020, we thought it would only last a few weeks or so, but so many people refused to follow safety guidelines. Covid deniers swore up and down that covid was a hoax and/or that it wasn't a big deal. Some even said that even if covid was a big deal, the elderly would gladly sacrifice themselves to save the economy. My mom, aunts, and uncles are elderly, and I'd rather they not die within a few weeks of getting covid. Nor would I want them to deal with long term covid symptoms for the rest of their lives.

When we had about 225 cases and about 15 deaths, lots of people tried explaining to covid deniers that that's a very worrying death rate. Covid deniers tried using the millions of cases of the season flu and thousands of flu deaths as a reason to disregard the covid death rate entirely, even though those numbers showed that covid was much more deadly than the common flu. I've had friends from high school block me on Facebook because I said 15 deaths with 225 cases is a much worse death rate than 61,000 deaths with 45 million cases. Fast forward to today, the US is at just over 41,000,000 total reported covid cases with just over 669,000 deaths.

Now we've got all sorts of ridiculous dumb ass misinformation about the covid vaccines being spread like wildfire.

• Anti-vaxxers claim covid vaccines change your DNA. They don't. When I had covid in late December through late January, I had even had a job recruiter call me while I was about a week and a half into it. He ended up going into some weird speech about how the covid vaccines change your DNA. I should have just hung up on him.
• Anti-vaxxers claim the covid vaccines were rushed. They weren't. The only reason the covid vaccines didn't take 10 - 12 years to come out is because of extremely high public interest. The part that makes vaccines take 10 - 12 years on average is that it takes forever to fund raise and recruit people for clinical trials for diseases that people don't care about very much.
• Anti-vaxxers claim covid vaccines make you magnetic. They don't. That claim is dumb AF.

And we also have anti-maskers threatening violence and sometimes actually physically attacking school administrators, school board members, and kids over this madness.

I just don't see a good way to reason with people like them. And they're actively prolonging this pandemic by refusing to follow any kind of safety guidelines or get vaccinated.

Kinda reminds me of my days doing ISP tech support and desktop tech support and running across ridiculously unreasonable people on a regular basis. Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised.

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Remember when quarantine was only going to last 2 weeks? Pepperidge Farm remembers

The realization that "what oughtta happen!" and "what actually happens" are distinctly different things, is just being an adult.

Questionmarktarius posted...

The realization that "what oughtta happen!" and "what actually happens" are distinctly different things, is just being an adult.

Yeah, but in the past, the overwhelming vast majority of the public would line up to get vaccinated when it was necessary.

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Questionmarktarius posted...

The realization that "what oughtta happen!" and "what actually happens" are distinctly different things, is just being an adult.

lol shut up Plato

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Yup. I actually used to really like meeting people from wildly different places with wildly different lifestyles. My curiosity about other people has kind of died since the start of the pandemic. I've just seen how ugly can be. Not just murderers and abusive parents, but ordinary people. Kind of shot my faith in others.

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CableZL posted...

Yeah, but in the past, the overwhelming vast majority of the public would line up to get vaccinated when it was necessary.

What do you think changed from the past to the present?

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Questionmarktarius posted...

The realization that "what oughtta happen!" and "what actually happens" are distinctly different things, is just being an adult.

Yes but the understanding of why "oughtta" and "actually" don't align can often lead to disillusionment. Sometimes it's for normal reasons like the real world being more complicated than you initially thought, that's normal growing up. Sometimes it's because fucking idiots are too stupid to take a deadly virus seriously. That's a solid case to be disillusioned at any age.

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yemmy posted...

What do you think changed from the past to the present?

Half the country convinced itself that the other half are insane assholes, and so did that other half.

idk Life seems basically normal to me again. Only thing really missing was concerts and those are back.

I try to stay away from being obsessed with politics and its honestly good

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Questionmarktarius posted...

Half the country convinced itself that the other half are insane assholes, and so did that other half.

Yeah, I'm not buying this both sides bullshit.

The COVIDiot side is objectively the insane assholes. Full stop.

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Questionmarktarius posted...

Half the country convinced itself that the other half are insane assholes, and so did that other half.

How far in the past are we going? Because that is not a new thing.

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CDC lifting mask mandates was one of the dumbest decisions made by anyone in the last 2 years.

yemmy posted...

What do you think changed from the past to the present?

I think it's a mix of a number of things.

• The intentional degradation of the quality of the US education system
• The weird indoctrination thing the US does that seems to give people a weird sense of American exceptionalism, and causes them to cling desperately to their own individualism and entirely disregard normal societal duties.

We literally have millions of anti-vaxxers saying things like "My decision to not get vaccinated doesn't affect anyone else!" Then when they get a severe covid infection, they take up all of the ICU beds and make it much harder for non-covid patients to get the care they need.

• A man in Houston was shot 6 times and had to wait at least 10 days to get surgery because covid patients took all of the ICU beds.
• A US Army veteran died because he had a gallstone and they couldn't find an available ICU bed for him.
• When anti-vaxxers were pushing hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic for covid, they rushed out and bought up lots of hydroxychloroquine even though it wasn't ever proven to actually help with covid. Then people who actually needed hydroxychloroquine to treat lupus had a much harder time finding it.

This whole "I've got mine, fuck everyone else" mentality that so many people seem to have is going to end up screwing us over.

I hope we won't still be dealing with covid when the next pandemic comes around.

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CableZL posted...

This whole "I've got mine, f*** everyone else" mentality that so many people seem to have is going to end up screwing us over.

Which ironically is proving not to be so true.

Vaccinated people still need to mask up and try to avoid catching covid.

It can still be very nasty.

yemmy posted...

How far in the past are we going? Because that is not a new thing.

In the US, specifically, it's all the way back to Adams vs Jefferson.

WingsOfGood posted...

Which ironically is proving not to be so true.

Vaccinated people still need to mask up and try to avoid catching covid.

It can still be very nasty.

Yes, vaccinated people still need to mask up and avoid catching covid. I never claimed otherwise, so I'm not sure what you're saying is "proving not to be so true." Unvaccinated people typically far fare worse when infected with covid, though. The vast majority of people in hospitals because of covid are unvaccinated. The vast majority of people who go to the hospital because of covid and die are unvaccinated. That is no accident. We're just dealing with waning vaccine efficacy, so booster shots are going to be necessary. This is normal with many vaccines.

Many vaccines require multiple shots. The polio vaccine requires 4 doses. The reason polio was eradicated in the US was because we had widespread vaccine acceptance AND pretty much every state requires kids to be vaccinated against polio in order to attend public school.

On that note, Republicans in Tennessee recently tried to stop ALL vaccine outreach to children, which is one of the dumbest decisions I've seen. Fortunately, they reversed course after getting a lot of criticism.

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American exceptionalism is a disease, one arguably worse than COVID itself

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I really don't know how you could live in America and not be disillusioned at this point

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Most people are stupid; Covid proved this.

DarthAragorn posted...

I really don't know how you could live in America and not be disillusioned at this point

Outside Internet forums, its not as doom and gloom as you think it is

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darkprince45 posted...

Outside Internet forums, its not as doom and gloom as you think it is

Healthcare workers would disagree. The families of the almost 670,000 dead from covid in the past 20 months or so would disagree.

Hopefully the delta variant is the last dominant covid strain, but... the more we just allow covid to spread, the more chance that another even more infectious and deadly strain will come around and make things even worse.

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is it really a good idea to admit you're a serial killer?

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HylianFox posted...

is it really a good idea to admit you're a serial killer?

Who is admitting they're a serial killer in this topic?

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Wishing things weren't the way they are leads to suffering

A pond will only be still after you stop struggling

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Njolk posted...

Wishing things weren't the way they are leads to suffering

A pond will only be still after you stop struggling

So I should drown in order to let the pond be still?

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CableZL posted...

Healthcare workers would disagree. The families of the almost 670,000 dead from covid in the past 20 months or so would disagree.

I work with health care workers every day. I see them everyday. Im in hospitals everyday. I assure you theyre living their life normally. People in this type of work tend to disassociate the work and time to be home.

and yes the people that died is a tragedy and Republicans fucked it all up. But as a society we heal and move on

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darkprince45 posted...

I work with health care workers every day. I see them everyday. Im in hospitals everyday. I assure you theyre living their life normally. People in this type of work tend to disassociate the work and time to be home.

and yes the people that died is a tragedy and Republicans f***ed it all up. But as a society we heal and move on

Yes, I'm sure nurses are walking away from the profession all over the place because they're living their lives normally, healing, and moving on.

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Nursing staffing has always had issues, covid has it made worse. But its nothing to be disillusioned with life about dude

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RchHomieQuanChi posted...

American exceptionalism is a disease, one arguably worse than COVID itself

^

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Trump started all the divide because they were trying their best to keep the economy going at least until the election. They knew lockdowns would destroy the economy. He tried avoiding it as much as he could up until the point where they realized not doing anything would rapidly make things worse before the election and thats when he finally changed his mind. His rhetoric this whole time was to project optimism so the markets and outlook wouldn't crash. Which I don't blame him for but he didn't do it the right way. He did it in a way that minimized how dangerous the virus and for the most part didn't take things seriously. His followers always had that skepticism in their minds from the beginning because of him, and the root cause was to protect his own job (presidency). Thats why despite peak covid numbers ravaging this country, and again covid filling up hospitals and ICU beds, killing off 670k people already, people are still skeptical. I mean these are ordinary people - my neighbors who are firefighters, cops, engineers, teachers - these guys all jump on the slightest conspiracy theory that downplays the situation. They will never change. Their family members could die of covid and they will never change.

darkprince45 posted...

Nursing staffing has always had issues, covid has it made worse. But its nothing to be disillusioned with life about dude

I'm disillusioned with society, not life, and I've laid out the reasons why in exact terms. I only talked about healthcare workers in this regard because you're trying to pretend they aren't beyond burnt out watching people die from covid day in day out for 20+ months.

Our healthcare system getting overrun is something we shouldn't accept because it makes it harder to get healthcare in general when you need it. A lot of people just seem to not care about that. Until it affects them personally, of course.

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Anti-vaxxers love to tell people about how the CDC, NIH, NIAID, doctors, nurses scientists, etc., who advise getting vaccinated against covid, can't be trusted to tell the truth about covid or the vaccines.

Then when they get a severe covid infection, they take up an ICU bed that someone else needs in a hospital full of doctors and nurses who all follow guidelines from the CDC, NIH, NIAID, etc.

We have anti-vaxxers going to feed stores and buying ivermectin paste meant for horses and eating it because they read something on Facebook. Then when they get sick from it, they call poison control, which follows CDC guidelines.

They trust the CDC when they get sick themselves, but go on and on about how they can't trust the CDC. Gotta wonder how many people have to die or suffer from long term illnesses listening to their advice before they change their ways.

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I started noticing this crap when the tea party was a thing. The current far right is the natural progression of the tea party. Americans refuse to be educated. The only thing you can do is do whats best for you. Or take advantage of them.

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Anti-vax movements have existed since vaccines were introduced, it hasn't stopped the world from improving.