One night long ago, I saw a small cat in an underpass during a downpour in Louisiana. I was driving home in the dark when my headlights caught a glimpse of an animal that was cowering on the sidewalk as the puddle down there started to become a flood. Part of me wanted to keep driving, but another part said, "No. Turn around, asshole," and I listened to the part that didn't wanna think that I let something drown. So I went back. It was late, like about two in the morning, and few other cars were on the road. I stopped in the underpass, railroad tracks above me, and I got out. There I saw the cat, just a bit older than a kitten, and I approached it, using as soothing a voice as I could. But when I got close, it hissed and clawed at me. What the fuck was I doing? "Goddamnit," I thought because I knew I couldn't give in to the voice in my head that said, "Fuck that cat. Go home." I went back to the car and found a large towel in the trunk.
When I approached the cat again, it hissed, spit, did that weird growl-meow thing, and tried to claw me. I sat on the sidewalk with the towel and waited, talking gently. I knew it was wet and freaked out, but I wanted to help it. At one point, I reached out to try to pet it, but the little shit just fucking ripped my hand, and really, I kind of wanted to kill it myself right then. Instead, I tried again to soothe it, but it wasn't happening, and the water was gonna be up to where the cat was gonna have to swim for it and probably not make it. So, screw it, I covered my hands in the towel, reached out quickly, and grabbed the damn cat, wrapping it in the towel while it screamed and tried to claw. "Stop it! I'm trying to fucking help you!" I said, obviously expecting the cat to understand me. I put it in the passenger seat where I could hold the towel closed. Yeah, I know the cat was panicking, but it was this or probably drowning or getting run over or something other horrible thing. Eventually, through cat magic, it got out of the towel and was free in the car. Fortunately, it didn't attack my face. It just hissed and leaped onto the floor in the back, hiding under the seat. I stopped at a gas station to get something for my bleeding hand. When I got out of the car, the cat leaped out and ran under the barely open garage door. As it was running away, I muttered, "You're welcome, you dumb fuck." I don't have strong opinions on cats in general one way or the other. I mean, I'm allergic as hell, but I don't hate them or anything. However, I hated that cat, and I would have saved it again if I had to.
I thought about this short, silly story as I read again and again about how we the vaccinated, we who believe that the vaccine is not only safe but is the only way out of the coronavirus clusterfuck, we who want everyone to get vaccinated need to reason with the willfully unvaccinated (who are different than those who can't get it because of some medical condition or are too young; I'm also leaving out those who are in communities that are underserved by the health care system, so, really, basically, I'm talking about Republicans), need to be more understanding, and need to calmly explain the vaccine to them.
But you know what? There are a fuckton of us who think that we had months of understanding. And where the fuck did that get us?
We're furious. We're furious at adults who made adult decisions that fucked it all up. We're furious that, after all the shit they've done to fuck up this country by voting for Trump, they won't do this one goddamn thing by getting the vaccine that Trump is legitimately partially responsible for getting developed so quickly. So this was your win, and you refused to take the W.
Jesus fuck, Trump voters should be having crazed, hedonistic vaccination parties, whooping it up with shitty fast food and fucking each other wearing nothing but red MAGA hats as they celebrate their great and glorious Covid killer president with a primal orgy of doughy flesh suctioning against doughy flesh and wheezy cigarette coughing in harmony with inarticulate grunts of ecstasy, all in worship of their orange god who has deigned them worthy of saving, firing guns in the air in triumph. Yeah, you dumb motherfuckers, you missed a golden opportunity to own us liberals so fuckin' good that we would have had to throw up our hands and say, "You're right. We are so fucking owned. Here's a delicious cup of our tears for you to drink" while we get the vaccine, too.
But you didn't. Instead, you decided that it had become tainted because Trump lost, and you decided to say fuck everyone, and you decided to disappear down the shit-smeared rabbit-holes of conspiracy theory YouTube videos and worthless websites and Tucker Carlson's smug, elitist maw. You decided that the hurt feelings of one man were more important than saving the nation. You made these decisions, on your own, as motherfucking grown-ups, and now we're supposed to reach out to you and gently cajole you to do something like you're tired children? Fuck you. That fucking ship sailed.
Bitches, we want you to get vaccinated not just for us, but for you. We want you to get vaccinated so you don't get sick and clog our hospitals with your ventilated semi-corpses, driving our awful health care system even further into the ground. We want you to get vaccinated so you're not a goddamned incubator for the next variant, the one that the vaccine can't mitigate the effects of or the one that really fucking kills our children. Yeah, we want to save your fucking asses even if you don't want them saved with the added bonus that it saves us.
We're fucking angry because we were legit so fucking close to being over this virus. If vaccinations had continued at the rate they were going in the first part of the year, we'd be at herd immunity. But rather than that actual freedom, you fucknuts think that you have the "freedom" to go around spreading Covid to whoever the fuck gets in your ignorant way and you call that a constitutional right. No, it's not. It's not your right to spread a disease that might kill even 1 out of 100 people who get it.
We're fucking angry because every fucking thing you say about Covid is just blindingly stupid. It's "poison"? So you think the 180 million people in the United States who got at least one dose of the vaccine are gonna die? You think that the thousands of people who worked on the vaccines are in a secret conspiracy that none of them will reveal? And for those who say they wanna wait to see, man, it's been over a year since the first batch of test subjects got vaccinated. They're alive. I know a couple of them. They're not gonna suddenly explode in five more years or grow demon testicles on the backs of their heads in ten. That's not how vaccines work. That's not how any of this works.
Or you say some shit like "It was rushed." No, you goddamned pathetic moron. Decades of research on this type of vaccine and even more decades of modern fucking medicine got us to the point where we could do this quickly. That's a good thing. It's so good that Trump gave the effort to do it the spastic little boy name of "Operation Warp Speed." So you can't support Trump and say the vaccine was rushed. He fucking rushed it. And as long as the medical scientists say it's cool, even those of us who fucking hate Trump are good with it.
If you're a vaccine hesitant evangelical because "God gave us immune systems" or whatever, then don't take painkillers or antibiotics when you're sick. God hates hypocrites. He told me that. You don't believe me? Why? 'Cause I might just be making shit up? Yeah, welcome to religion, motherfuckers. Besides, you can always get your God on by saying that the invisible sky wizard waved a magic wand and gave humans the ability to create vaccines to stop viruses the Devil made. Man, this shit is easy.
And I'm not even gonna address the microchip/magnetism/alien DNA or whatever crazy horse diarrhea is flowing out of some people's idiot mouths. Fuck those people. Covid can take them. (That's a joke, you fucking mental invalids.)
This isn't even to get into the way you cockscabs have attacked Anthony Fauci and other scientists desperately trying to save your worthless lives. That deserves its own post.
But most of all, we're angry at how easy this could have all been. The vaccines were done. They were rolled out pretty damn smoothly and quickly. I can't get past how such a simple, common thing like getting a vaccine became a war. It's so ludicrous. It's so goddamn ludicrous. How can you look at case after case of people who were against the vaccine who now are sick or dead and still cling to that belief? That makes you such a fool. You're wrong. You're just so fucking wrong about everything here.
So, yeah, we've been patient. And now we're ready to do what it fucking takes to get you vaccinated. No, that doesn't mean forced vaccination. We're not evil, despite what you think. But, if that means paying you to do it, fine. I do not have a problem with that. And I won't even be a selfish dick about it and whine that I should have been paid, too. But we are gonna have to make it hurt if you still refuse to get vaccinated, and that should mean you don't get to participate in daily life. Bottom fucking line. We need to do like France and say, "Yeah, go fuck yourself with a baguette if you wanna go to restaurants or clubs or bars or sports stadiums without being vaccinated." And that might mean a fucking genuine i.d. card or phone app or something to prove it, not just a scribbled little card that can easily be faked. See? No one is forcing you to put on pants. We're just saying that if you don't wear pants, you gotta stay home.
To get back to the cat story up top, it's not a perfect analogy. My stakes with the cat were infinitely lower than our stakes with Covid. But it works in this way: I didn't like that cat. That cat didn't like me. At the end of the day, all that mattered was to stop it from dying, no matter how stupid and scared and stubborn it was. Once that was done, once that simple but meaningful interaction had finished, we could go back to whatever we wanted to do, a bit scarred, but alive.
