uspol -
Could we please stop being smug whenever someone who's fought masks/vaccination/etc kicks off from this damn thing? Yes they're harming the community, yes I want them to change their mind, but that's still a person dying from this fucking thing and I *can't* feel good about that. Not sure whether it's that this feels too much like the obsession with punishment I grew up around or that I've had a mild version of what took them out and hate it, but maybe there's a better way to communicate that they were very tragically wrong.
re: uspol -
@Leucrotta I felt that way for a very long time but after a certain point of ingratitude, gaslighting, and open hostility I just... stopped feeling obliged to keep empathizing with people who have rejected EVERY overture to not be my enemy.
I can still muster sympathy for people who just quietly *don't want* the vaccine. Quite a bit, actually. There's a woman I follow on Youtube whose channel is very woo-heavy and it's attracted a lot of new agey vaccine skeptics.
Them, I'm generally pretty nice to. In their presence, I try to be the Reasonable Friend Who Shared Their Fears And Is Just Fine, See? I tell them-- truthfully-- that I was very worried about the vaccine interacting with my host of weird autoimmune issues. And that it's not unreasonable at all to be afraid of having something foreign and scary put into your body. I really hope I've at least reached one of them.
But as for, say, hard-core Trumpies who wear "fuck your feelings" masks on airplanes and abuse the staff... it's gotten real hard not to see what's happening to them as Sherman's Second March To The Sea, except that a virus is doing all the fighting for us. It feels like these people really would have made us make war on them, and this just hits them hard while letting us keep our hands clean, so to speak. There's something so *civilized* about a war that anybody can escape by just LISTENING TO THEIR FUCKING DOCTOR.
So yeah. I'll cheer for COVID to take pastors and senators and such who SPREAD this nonsense. And I'll cheer for it to take the sort of people who would have just spent the rest of their lives on trying to take away, say, Peg's freedom to be Peg. I didn't want it to be that way, but I am done trying to stop them from performing the admittedly incredibly convenient act of dying.
But still. All it takes to get my empathy and humanity back is showing me a shred of it to start with. All these people have to do is approach the topic with calm, polite concern instead of being smug assholes. It's actually happened, and I do still engage them with sympathy, if a bit less than I had last year.
I wouldn't even feel this cruel about the worst of the Trumpies going from "muh freedom" to "muh ventilator" if I didn't already feel that ALL reasonable attempts to communicate with them had not only been ignored, but got their active hostility.
So yeah, I don't think I'm going to be able to stop cheering when I see someone die who's been actively hostile to our concerns for them. Them dying now is starting to seem like our last, best hope of being able to take the country back from them, and... you have seen how fucking hard I tried to make nice to the Republicans once upon a time.
I still think you are very noble to want to avoid that feeling yourself, though. *hug* You're NEVER wrong to say people should get whatever empathy we have left for them, even if they've done wrong, in that GLIMMER of a hope we can win someone back over.
It's still a damn shame we couldn't save them. I just can't pretend not to be a little relieved when reality weighs in our side YET AGAIN after someone willfully, angrily, defiantly walks straight into this and dies.
re: uspol -
@zebratron2084 I mean, Republicans don’t understand nuance or “gentle” so it probably will require some vocal folks to kick off for the rest to actually do the right thing, and the magas who’ve gone from this were probably completely vile people. But it feels off to me, y’know? Very social media. And I HATE this virus.
And I don’t think I’m being noble, b/c I grew up with a lot of “people being really harsh, it’s only a matter of time before they turn that on me” if that makes sense?
re: uspol -
@Leucrotta Oof, yeah, OK, I have NO TROUBLE AT ALL agreeing with you that it can feel very bandwagony and "Two-Minutes-Hate"-y. It does have the potential to spawn into something far, far worse if we let it become a habit.
I think you've convinced me to at least *try* not to feed those kinds of posts. No guarantees-- I'm not sure I'm even gonna have basic emotional reins again for the rest of 2021 at this rate. But you have a REALLY good point and thank you for hammering it home for me.
re: uspol -
@Leucrotta I guess if I were to play devil's advocate for it one last time... I think the main feeling these posts feed off of is VINDICATION.
I think it's reasonable right now for leftists to crave stories that
prove, after years of shameless gaslighting, that reality is catching up with the Trumpies. And if the story involves our abusers and their enablers suffering from that proof, it's going to REALLY fill that need.
And it's hard to blame them for it, because it's been traumatic as fuck watching these people run roughshod over us and bullshit us straight to our faces.
You've still got me wondering all over again if it's something we can trust. I'm still going to try to quash the habit of joining in, because you're still damn right that this could turn into something VERY ugly. And that something feels fakey and too-easy about how social media is encouraging it.
I just feel like there's more than mere smugness at work here. It's not just "we were better and smarter than you," it's "the things we were pretty sure were lies, and you got mad at us for questioning, turned out to be true and maybe we also won't have to put up with as much of your shit now."
I think I can at least see why these feel like a punch-up instead of a punch-down to a lot of leftists right now. And the further down they punch, yeah, the less sympathy I have.
My stepsister, for example, is a dipshit but she's not a Redcap-- she just read some Facebook posts and is also quite dim. *sigh* But she doesn't deserve to die for that, and I'd be mad if someone slid into her memorials to make fun of her.
She walked into this of her own free will, but she hasn't forced it on anyone, she hasn't preached it at anyone, and she hasn't made any money off of it. Her sin is no greater than, say, believing newspaper astrology is objectively real, or believing in the Loch Ness Monster.
But when it happens to be the same sort of person who's been gaslighting us about everything ELSE for the last 6+ years, whether as a politician or a voter... and it turns out their latest line of cargo cult bullshit, that they ridiculed us for disbelieving, KILLED them?
It's gonna be really hard not to smile. And I am probably gonna still do it on the inside. :>