I fucking hate wearing a mask. Every single time I have to put it on - when entering a supermarket or walking through a park nearby - I get irrationally angry - no, correct that - I get rationally angry at our leaders, our mayors and governors and, of course, our goddamn president, for not having done something when they knew this was coming. Every single time I wash my hands to the point of cracking my skin, I can feel my blood pressure rise in rage at how badly the whole response to this pandemic was fucked up.
I went to my office for the first time in two months last week and I honestly felt whole again. I could only stay long enough to pick up a few things, but, damn, I missed being there. I like my job as a professor. And I fucking despise having to teach online classes, as I have this spring semester and as I will during the summer and as I almost certainly will in the fall. I fucking despise Zoom meetings and I'm motherfucking sick of motherfucking discussion boards.
I want to go out and sit at a dive bar and listen to the rantings of the guy who's just a little drunker than I am. I want to go to a small-venue concert with a bunch of sweaty people who are all jostling each other to get closer to the stage. I want to go see insane theatre in tiny spaces and I want to go see blockbuster movies in giant spaces. I want to go eat at my favorite Indian joints, where the takeout is fine, but, goddamn, it's just so much better right out of the kitchen.
In other words, I want the economy to open up. I don't give a fuck if it gives Donald Trump a boost in the polls. I want to do the shit I like doing.
But I know that if I wanna do the shit I like doing, then I better do the shit I don't like doing first and for long enough. You stop taking your antibiotics before you're supposed to and that fuckin' sinus infection is coming right back.
Yet President Donald Trump, who is actually three short, fat, child-molesting clowns standing on top of each other in a terrible-fitting suit, thinks that Democrats and people on the left don't want shit to open up: "If it was up to some people, let's keep it closed for a long time. OK? A long time. And watch the United States go down the tubes," he said in an interview. And when he was prancing around Michigan, shitting on the state's governor and Secretary of State, he proclaimed, "You have a lot of — unfortunately, in this case, Democrat governors — I think they think it’s good politics to keep it closed." He tweeted, "The Democrats are moving slowly, all over the USA, for political purposes. They would wait until November 3rd if it were up to them."
It's become another article of Trumpian faith on the right that Democrats don't give a fuck about the economy or jobs, that we don't want everything to open back up because a bad economy hurts Trump or because we want to use the shutdown to convert everything over to socialism or the metric system or to let Hillary run more child sex dungeons or whatever crazy shit Republicans toss out there. One Republican official in Texas went so far as to say coronavirus is a hoax made up by Democrats because we hate Trump so much.
We don't want that, you poor, deluded motherfuckers. We wanna do the shit we like doing, just like you. We're tired of old baseball games and Netflix's latest "Let's exploit mental illness for shits and giggles and subscribers" documentaries. The difference is simple. We don't want to have to open it all up just to shut it all down in the winter when we bumblefuck into a second wave that we should have been preparing for but haven't because President Hydroxy Glow won't do what needs to be done. We want more testing - not just tests available, but more actual testing - and some kind of way to do contact tracing. Except dumbass conservatives start screaming about freedom because Walmart wants them to wear a mask and, oh, shit, you may as well open a concentration camp now.
So, yeah, Democrats don't want to pretend it's all okay when it fucking well isn't. The problem isn't that we want to hurt Trump. It's that Trump is afraid of getting hurt.
Lemme tell you something I said on Twitter a couple of weeks ago: I tested positive for the COVID-19 antibody. That means I had it, probably in mid-March when I had a low-grade fever and a cough that went away within a week or so. I had quarantined myself because I'm not a dick, and I got better with virtually no effects beyond being a little tired. My doctor wanted me to get tested back then, but that was during the time when the utter clusterfuck of failures by the Trump administration made it pretty much impossible to get one unless I was hacking up a lung at death's door. But when I went to my doctor for something else at the end of April, she said she had the antibody test and that I should take it. I was first patient of hers to test positive, and I immediately asked about donating plasma because, again, I'm generally not a dick.
Now, acknowledging that the tests produce false-positives (and hopefully the New York Blood Center will confirm the test) and acknowledging that there is scant evidence whether or not having the antibody protects you from future infection, there is at least a chance that I'm better off than perhaps 90% of the population (acknowledging also that we simply don't know how many people had coronavirus and recovered because of the aforementioned and ongoing clusterfuck).
So let's say they discover, holy shit, I'm immune, as is everyone who tests positive for the antibody. If I were a dick, I'd say, "Fuck everyone else. I'm goin' to the movies." But I don't want that. I want a government that does this shit right. I want a society that opens up and accepts the reality of the virus-fucked world we're in. I want to get to the the new normal.
And that's taking everyone into consideration, every stupid shitheel who goes nutzoid when the Piggly-Wiggly manager says to wear a mask, everyone who is healthy and everyone who is not, everyone's grandma and grandpa and everyone's child. It's not about politics. It's about getting shit right by acknowledging shit has to change and then opening back up.
To me, it's utter madness that everyone doesn't believe this. To me, it's that Trump and his MAGA cretins want to open everything in order to help his reelection chances, death and long-term effects of this virus be damned.