My wife, aka the Lovely Mrs, does not like it when I respond, “Thin the herd,” to news of the latest completely avoidable misery some idiot has inflicted on him/herself. It’s “unkind”. “We should be better than that.”
As always, she is right of course. We should all have fathomless compassion and empathy for our fellow humans. I think the nuns used to say that. But really, what are we supposed to say, much less do, when you read stories titled, “99% Of People Killed By Covid Last Month Were Unvaccinated, Analysis Finds.”
After the criminal incompetence the Trump administration, which has to be praying there’s never a 9/11-style commission to analyze how it is The United friggin’ States suffered the most deaths of any “sh*thole country” in the world, we’ve enjoyed a stunning turn around. Free … free … vaccines are available to everyone in thousands of locations nationwide. Plus, they’re demonstrating startling effectiveness against the original virus and every variant that has come along since. It’s as close to total protection as science may have ever gotten.
So what we’re now left with are … wait for it … (very) low information, mostly Red State, mostly political partisans who believe only what right wing media carnival barkers tell them. Once again, and I ask you if you’ve heard this before, the rest of us are handicapped in a return to “normalcy” (what that is exactly is a whole other topic) by, excuse me dear, utter fools. By people endangering themselves and continuing to overburden hospital staffs with a disease they could have avoided with a painless … free … shot at their local WalMart.
I have to credit the “Thin the herd” line to Jesse Ventura. Told the story of yet another drunken idiot who drowned trying to skip his snowmobile over open water, the Guv remarked, “Well, that’s nature’s way of thinning the herd.” In more Darwinian terms, idiots being idiots, they needlessly engage in life-threatening activities more often than their intelligent brethren. Consequently they die out faster, ending their opportunities to pass on their judgment-challenged DNA to a new generation of drunken snowmobile open-water skippers … or COVID deniers.
I believe the great, monolithic American insurance industry could do something about this. The cost of the average COVID hospitalization is somewhere in the range of $34,000 to $46,000. At this point in the pandemic, after an aggressive and effective government program to distribute … free … vaccine to every nook, cranny and West Virginny holler of the country, insurance companies should announce that, like suicide, they’re not going to pay death benefits … or hospitalization costs. There’s simply no excuse for anyone anywhere to continue to expose themselves to COVID. Those who do … well, they’re on their own. Might be time to pawn the rifles and pickup, kids.
Is this unkind? Well, I suppose it is. But some people engage irrational, foolish, life-threatening activities all the time, and I’m not talking about free-soloing El Capitan. There are the idiot-macho bikers, who weave in between cars on a freeway without a helmet. Or book a weekend at a “Redneck Rave” and end up getting impaled not far from the big mud-bathin’ hole. Or roar out to negligibly-vaccinated, far western Colorado for the big “Country Jam”, to get it on with 50,000 or so of their “it’s no worse than flu” compadres. Or hell, start planning for their return to Sturgis … if they’re finally off their ventilators.
These people are a lost cause. They’ve made All American free choice decisions to endanger themselves and others and lay off the cost of saving their low-information lives on professionals who need a year off, not another six months of 24-7 work saving fools from their own stupidity.
So, talking Darwin again here, I ask you, should these COVID-deniers perish as a consequence of their own Constitutionally-protected decisions, is the human gene pool better or worse off?
Talk amongst yourselves.
A modest proposal, Mr Swift.
A version of this is the anger I felt paying higher insurance premiums as a smoker but a somewhat healthy eater while the three-Big-Macs-a-day folks, supersize fries and gallon Cokes with every order, paid lower premiums. But giving government or unrestrained business the ability to determine what’s healthy and what’s not sets us on a slippery slope. Especially with a Trump or DeSantis at the head of government.
I like your concept — and also the recognition that people rescued off El Capitan at public expense are likely educated liberals. And maybe this is a clear enough case of a public health emergency to justify not paying for anti-vaxers’ hospital bills (unless of course there are health reasons for not being vaccinated — but, again, who determines what a legitimate health reason is?).
This question will get thornier the longer the plague sticks around, able to hide and spread in anti-vax territory. Watch for stampedes from the herd. And don’t give up the Netflix subscription yet.
“Thin the herd” is a good phrase. I also like, “Cut out the cancer.” A huge American demographic has come to accept Lying as an acceptable strategy toward preserving that which is most important to them. Pray tell, you say… What is most important? Their tax breaks? Their privilege? Their egos, and their desperately held superiority to the liberals? Good answers all, and in fact, the third is best. This country suffers from the cancer of pride, and the correlative fear of shame. Nothing is more powerful than shame, and the fear that oneself is “bad.” And it is Bad to have voted republican all these years. They do not have the courage to admit that they were wrong. Wrong about Covid, wrong about Trump, wrong about Iraq, wrong about Science and Global Warming. It is cowardice – fear of admitting one’s mistakes – that is the cancer of this country. And it goes by the name of Republican.
We are foolish when we think we can ever convince them that we have policies that will help them. They don’t care about policy. They care about preserving their egos, and protecting themselves from Shame.
Very entertaining catharsis, and I agree that the gene pool, to say nothing of the voting pool, would be better off without people who don’t have the smarts to survive at a stage when survival is so damn easy.
You lose me on your presumably tongue-in-cheek suggestion about insurers–they’ve got a contractual obligation to treat even the imbecilic — but the larger point about them being shitty herd mates is true and typically well-stated.
Oh and here’s to the Lovely Mrs. for her persisting in her Sisyphean struggle to try to do what the nuns failed to do.
Last I checked, it was illegal to smoke in hospitals, office buildings, stadiums, airplanes, airports, buses, light rail, and public spaces name a few. Why? To help negate the spread of the deadly diseases caused by smoking. Science proves that COVID is far more deadly
(Over 600,000 in the US alone.). In my mind, people who refuse to be vaccinated have little regard for the lives of others. That said, I have little or no respect for their lives. To borrow a phrase, ‘they are “lost cause’. As such, there is a need for thinning that herd.
Brian — I know how cathartic righteous anger can feel and I’m as guilty of that as anyone, but your “thin the herd” proposal fails to take into account the implacable math of a pandemic like this one. I’ll attach this story from The Atlantic’s Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his COVID-19 reporting last year: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/3-principles-now-define-pandemic/619336/
If you don’t want to read the whole thing, skip down to Rule 3: long story short — the longer the virus is allowed to spread, the greater the likelihood that it will mutate into a form that our present vaccines cannot handle. It likely won’t happen overnight but it will happen unless — like a wild fire — it is denied more fuel to spread. The unvaccinated are that fuel right now but all of us who are vaccinated could — and would — eventually be part of that herd that is thinned.
Les … There’s a dose of facetiousness in my remarks here, but I admit I’m kind of obsessed with the fundamental laws of evolution. Thousands if not millions of species have died out because they failed — for whatever the reason — to adapt to threats in their environment. It’s the way the planet works. Sadly, in this case these people exercising their “freedom of choice” are inflicting the consequences of their poor decision-making on people who know better and have taken well-reasoned measures to protect themselves.