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.