People and Pandemic Fatigue

Cartoon of me, a sad-looking, green-eyed
brunette-with-grey woman, in a floral jacket
lying on her side on a white pillow.

That must be what it is. I mean, here I am, same Jenn in the same house with the same kids and the same job. I'm contented; I love my job, I love the kids at home and at work, but pretty much everyone else on the planet can go take a flying leap right now.

Well.

That's an exaggeration. 

I guess mostly it's disappointment in people I would've thought know better.

Yeah, yeah, I said I'd separate my personal life (here) from my public opinions (Vocal). Go over there if you want to read serious ranting on my part. But it's hard to compartmentalize to that degree, because I am part of the world. I may be a lot more introverted than I was before Laston's death and all this social distancing, but I'm not a hermit.

I'm a social being.

And it hurts me - sometimes (like now) to the point of actual, physical pain - to see people I otherwise respected until recently behaving so simultaneously unkindly and illogically.

How can you possibly think, for instance, that having an expert (whom you otherwise decry as being "a tool of the union") teaching your child their ABCs in person is more important than that teacher's life and health? Or that your child knowing they have a right to ask people not to touch them is wrong? Or that somehow, someway, being asked to wear a piece of cloth over your face is equivalent to actual atrocities?

I used to like everyone, or nearly everyone.

I don't right now.

Right now, school bus drivers are being stabbed in public school parking lots (we'll know more details of that on Monday) and we don't know why, but it'll probably be something like masking requirements in public school. Or the recent boogeyman of "Critical Race Theory" which isn't even being taught in public schools, certainly not at the elementary level. 

My own school district has people who tried to recall the school board during a worldwide emergency because they didn't like the way the pandemic was being handled. While the courts threw that out for lack of factual evidence, the same group is still spreading the same crap in a bid to challenge the school board in the next election. They keep getting called out and they keep ignoring the call-outs or inverting them.

I don't like being this cynical. I don't like disliking people. I don't like getting sick for the first time since January of 2020 (news flash, masks work, y'all) through a combination of stress and allergies.

But here we are.

Does it Hurt Your Brain?

It hurts mine, when I observe the cognitive dissonance - my own or someone else's - in action.

Example of my own: I know that I should not have more than one serving of dairy a day. I'm both lactose intolerant and mildly allergic to whey (one of the two main proteins in milk, along with casein). But I went ahead and had the homemade nachos (yum) and the a la mode part of the Abby's Homemade Apple Pie With Apples From Our Own Trees a la mode (even more yum). Want a picture of the pie?

homemade apple pie with a lattice top sprinkled with powdered sugar

Here ya go (no picture of the dairy - it was cheap vanilla ice cream from my local version of Kroger - but I digress. And yes, the crust is homemade from scratch. Abby's getting really good at this. But I digress again):

Anyway. The point is, I know better than to have two servings of dairy in one day - one meal - even with the Benadryl. And yet I did it.

And I owned my decision, except for a few minutes this morning (with a Benadryl hangover and before coffee or food) when I hated everyone. I was grimly prepared for my youngest to be a total jerk before she even got out of bed and I was cranky about it.

But that's the difference between me and the people I see around me exhibiting similar logical fallacies; I will own up to it when I notice it, have it pointed out to me, or fix the problem with caffeine and blood glucose.

I know I have written about this a zillion times, but the ones who truly make me want to slap them are the ones who clearly do not care about anyone but their own, though they give lip service to the "think of the children" schtick. They aren't thinking of the children. They're thinking of the "good ol' days" when it was more socially acceptable to be a jerk to everyone not exactly like them.

All of this is exacerbated (and probably in some cases, like freedumb-fighting antimaskers, triggered) by things like a global pandemic that's been going on for almost two years now.

It was interesting today, as I was perusing my Facebook feed (pretty well-curated; I try not to have an echo chamber but I don't want to listen to the likes of ultra-right talk show hosts, either. And again, before coffee or food and with that Benadryl hangover). I came across a discussion of Star Trek - generally a fairly safe topic, if often a little odd - and the various qualities of the different series.

And (as also often happens with discussions of Marvel movies, but again, I digress) people were losing their minds over how Gene Roddenberry must be turning over in his grave over "the slap in the face" that is Star Trek: Lower Decks. Not because it's animated, or slapstick, but because it's "too woke."

I'm sorry, when was Star Trek not woke? I mean, sure, there are differences based on what was considered appropriate at the time (um, hello, Orion Slave Girl Dancers), and individual episodes like Beverly Crusher and the Haunted Sex Lantern or Spock's Brain, but in general, Trek has always been about social justice and being a decent person and valuing diversity and so on. Even some Klingons are pretty aware of this, after all!

I feel like a lot of my peers in age - I'm firmly Gen X - have forgotten the lessons learned via Star Trek and Sesame Street and The Avengers when they were children. Instead, they have chosen to care only for themselves and the people just like them. Forget that IDIC and We All Sing With the Same Voice that you learned as a child.

And they don't seem to notice they're doing it, to get back to the main point of this post. Or if they do notice, and it causes them that cognitive dissonance, it just makes them meaner.

I was that person this morning before my coffee.

How do people who behave like that all the time manage?