I’m in a funk. An angry funk which is far worse than your average funk. That’s because an average funk can usually be remediated with some sort of dessert binge or retail therapy. My current funk seems to be both sugar and shopping resistant.
It started with all the vaccine liars and line jumpers and got a real kick in the pants to extreme funk after my post on these substandard humans was published. The emails I received due to that post were heartbreaking. I get a lot of emails but never in the history of this blog have I gotten so many missives from people who are truly suffering and getting the shaft.
How are people in their 90s not able to get a COVID vaccine? One would think when they fill out the “vaccine interest form” and put their year of birth as 1929 that a siren would go off and flag it as a DefCon1 event.
I also now have readers sharing their stories of neighbors, friends, co-workers and family members who have all worked the system to get vaccines. It’s beyond disheartening. Then my daughter started to pile on by sending me, almost daily, screenshots of healthy 19-year-olds on Snapchat bragging about getting the vaccine.
Making it worse I know these teenagers and the fact that these young people got both of their COVID vaccines before my 80 something next door neighbor is making me furious. My tipping point was the references by the Snapchatters to upcoming spring break bacchanalias now that they have their vaccines.
And here’s a thought if you’ve gotten the vaccine and your age, occupation or health criteria don’t fit the current county health tiers maybe you need to read the room and not share it on social media. Because basically your post is a great big middle finger to our elderly population.
My funk saga continued with emails that scolded me for being a “vaccine shamer.” One stated that I should be happy whenever someone is vaccinated because “that’s one less person who won’t die from COVID and it shouldn’t matter how they got their vaccine.”
Umm okay, I’ll tell that to all the octogenarians I know who are still waiting and haven’t left their house since March 13 of last year.
I fell into the dreaded deep funk/deep thought period when the Texas winter storm power tragedy/debacle happened. As a former Texan I was aghast. Then I was watching the news and a mother being interviewed, whose family had been without power for 72 hours and was using thawing snow to flush her toilets, said, “You just have to accept that in today’s American you’re all alone.”
It was a funk punch. Listen, I’m all for being self-sufficient but with this, now, year-long pandemic and witnessing the vaccine rollout I’m kind of feeling like this woman is right. We are all alone. It’s the Hunger Games out there.
The current mentality for survival seems to be that you take care of what yours, get what you can and screw everyone else because all your local, state or federal government is going to do is argue about who’s fault something is or make excuses while doing a Facebook Live update.
It’s bad and it’s a view that scares me. Sure, there are plenty of good people in the world but I think more and more our goodness is being diluted by fear and that fear is making us explore options that pre-pandemic we never would have considered like lying to get a vaccine.
I just hope post pandemic we can recover some of the moral ground that’s been lost and the erosion isn’t permanent.
Snarky in the Suburbs 