In which I admit it, I’m feeling despair.

Multiple airlines, who want bail-outs because of the pandemic, have announced they won’t be requiring staff to vaccinate. This makes me glad I chose not to fly out to DC in October to visit my friend Stephen.

No, it makes me angry. Fuck those fucking dipshits. I haven’t had a vacation in two years. I could fucking cry, really, but there you are. We were going to go to his cabin and eat and drink and chill and it was going to be restorative and fun and lovely, but nah. I’m going to take a week off and DO NOTHING, IN MY GODDAMNED HOUSE, IN THE SAME GODDAMNED BUILDING I’VE BEEN IN FOREVER. I need a vacation, I really do, but Jesus.

Spread of Covid in Oregon is heartbreakingly, unnecessarily high. The governor is expected to announce a new mask mandate tomorrow.

Everybody who works at Fox is vaccinated, no matter what incendiary, evil bullshit they say on the air. It’s publicly documented. You can see fucking photos of many of them getting their shots after a second’s online search. But they say the most horrific shit to their viewers, literal lies or weasely “I’m just asking questions” bullshit that a lot of people frankly aren’t intelligent enough to see through.

One in four hospitalized with Covid in Arizona, which has already started school, is under twenty years of age. Yes, KIDS GET IT. Whoever told you kids don’t get Covid fucking LIED TO YOU.

DeSantis is literally killing his constituents, live, in real time, and… nobody’s doing anything about it? But he also wants 600 ventilators and a bunch of ICU nurses, because everything’s fine and Covid isn’t really a thing? HOW IS THIS FUCKING HAPPENING. HOW. HOW THE FUCK IS IT HAPPENING.

Several states have no hospital beds left because they’re all full of unvaccinated Covid patients. People ask why they don’t just “put up tents” like they did last year, but “hospital bed” doesn’t mean the literal, actual bed: it means equipment and, more importantly, qualified staff.

The staff that aren’t already dead due to lack of PPE are quitting in droves, because they’ve been in the trenches for over a year and they’re demoralized and exhausted. It’s too much to be intubating unvaccinated people who insist they DON’T HAVE COVID, BECAUSE THEY DON’T BELIEVE COVID IS DANGEROUS, or, perhaps worse, people who beg for the vaccine now that they are personally sick enough to “believe” in it, even though it’s far too late.

Every local and regional news tweet about Covid or Covid policy has hysterical, ignorant, enraged, racist replies underneath it. “Fake news!” they scream. Or “this is because of illegal immigrants!” Or “Covid isn’t dangerous, this is all lies!” I recently read an anecdote by a nurse describing a nurse educator who honestly believes that leaving milk in the hall outside the doors of the Covid ill will attract and trap the virus.

Fucking IMAGINE an adult, with a job in healthcare, no less (!!!) fucking thinking that’s how anything works! Civilization is FUCKED!

Don’t even get me started on the ‘zombies’ bullshit. Anti-vaxxers are fucking wrong and should, under no circumstances, be entertained or allowed in debates or considered in any way whatsoever, full stop.

There’s a doctor that has been tweeting Covid dead for the past year and a half. Just little blurbs, but each one IS A DEAD HUMAN BEING. Now he’s got threads of dead children, dead pregnant women, and dead Covid deniers who recanted on their literal deathbeds and begged people to get vaccinated. I never watch those videos.

A million fucking people are dead, hundreds of thousands are hospitalized, and WORST OF ALL: surviving Covid is often worse than dying of it. This disease does permanent damage to organs. This disease causes fucking brain damage.

But a full third of the population refuses to know any of this, because they’ve been fed some incredibly insane bullshit by Fox or whatever they’re poisoning their minds with. I don’t know why right wing media wants its viewers to be poor, get sick and die, but it clearly does. It lies, literally outright lies, and I can’t figure out why it’s not being stopped. These outlets are tearing society apart, fomenting hatred, deliberately and with malice misinforming the population on everything from a deadly motherfucking disease to immigration, and nobody in authority is even acknowledging it.

For the past month, I have been the only person wearing a mask where I work. (For reasons I can’t explain even to myself, I’ve only been wearing it in the shop front, with customers, and not in the kitchen with co-workers, but shit, my co-workers are just as likely to turn me into a carrier as customers. None of them are distancing or masking, and I’m not even sure they’re all vaccinated.

I worry about this not just because I don’t want to accidentally infect somebody’s unmasked child while handing it some cheese or ice cream, but because there’s evidence you can get long Covid even if you’re vaccinated and asymptomatic. I emphatically do not want that.)

Based on the maps, Umatilla county is lousy with Covid. The mask mandate NEVER should have been lifted. These fucking people drive massive trucks they don’t need, carry guns they don’t need, and have a collective IQ of nine. They’re full of hatred, selfishness, distrust, and racism. I mean, most of them are fine, one-on-one, for a short conversation, but they don’t even know how much they don’t know about reality.

The bar across the street from the cheese shop has been fully open for awhile now. I know this because the new bartender comes in all the time for lunch. He doesn’t wear a mask.

The world is on fire. Russia, Lebanon, Greece, the United States. All burning. Here, we’re on our, what, fourth? fifth? heatwave of the year. Drought everywhere, flooding everywhere else. Shit is VERY, VERY BAD, but everybody’s just trying to get back to their normal rate of obscene consumption of resources. Just look at fucking truck ads, for fuck’s sake.

We’re having a crisis of compassion. We’re having a climate crisis. We’re having a crisis of civic duty. We’re having a crisis of venality and greed. We’re having about twenty crises at once. I’m sitting here in my air conditioning, feeling like a bloated tick on the skin of the world because I honestly can’t figure out what to do to help. I try very hard not to be the problem, but how does one become part of the solution? I can see clearly what’s needed, but I’m none of the things that one needs to be to do any of what’s necessary: stop the filibuster. Kill the police and fund non-military responses. Cut the military by 75%. End the industrial prison complex. Mandate national Covid responses. Universal healthcare. Make healthcare non-profit. End all monopolies and monopsonies. Tax corporations. Tax the rich. House the homeless. Decriminalize drugs. Build high speed rail. Stop pipelines. Enforce anti-pollution policies. Fund the IRS. Fund the FDA and get all those snake oil ads off the air and out of print. Prosecute everybody associated with the insurrection. Prosecute Trump’s entire thing. Make it illegal for anybody in any public office to accept anything whatsoever from anybody because OH MY FUCKING GOD THE SHIT THESE ASSHOLES VOTE FOR. Spank Wall Street into a snotty, cowering mess.

Just for a start.

I don’t know how anybody can look at any of this, let alone all of this, and think it has nothing to do with them. OF COURSE IT DOES. If you get sick or injured in the next, say, year, you might not be able to get a hospital bed in time to save your life. Because either the beds will be filled with terminally ill Covid-deniers, or there just won’t be any qualified fucking staff, because society is so fucking broken that they’ll all be PTSD-ridden and homeless, or they’ll have been fucking deported for being “foreign.”

Maybe where you live isn’t much affected by climate change, yet, but somewhere nearby is, and the people who will be shortly driven from there will be in your fucking neighborhood, and you’ll have to deal with it then. And your ONLY CHOICES will be to either fucking help, like a decent human being, or hate them because you’re a goddamned ignorant, selfish coward who lacks the intellectual capacity to understand that it WILL be you next. One way or another.

We’re all in this together, and while it’s been, for a long time, possible to ignore it, let me tell you: the bill is coming due, motherfuckers. You have to love, and you have to care, and you have to do better, because we’re entering several extinction-level scenarios simultaneously. Disease, climate catastrophe, and worst of all, unchecked, unmitigated Mammon-worship.

There has got to be a way to stop so much of society from being totally fucking evil, doesn’t there? Imagine extracting wealth from healthcare and somehow sleeping at night! How the FUCK is that even possible? How is it a thing that there’s an entire insurance apparatus that just dictates life-or-death outcomes in ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS for profit? It’s absurd, and yet there it is. How the FUCK is it that we send brainwashed, indoctrinated, armed soldiers to handle things like mental health crises or stolen cars in our cities and towns? How the FUCK is it that Congress just orders billions and trillions of dollars worth of war machinery that even the armed forces publicly admit they don’t want, just to line the pockets of the military industrial complex, and we all know about it and NOTHING IS DONE TO STOP IT? How the fuck is it that our society supports brutally razing homeless camps instead of, you know, giving them somewhere to fucking LIVE? We’re at the point where many of us actively hate people less fortunate than ourselves, and we don’t even question WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH US?!

If you ever find yourself hating, the very first thing you should do is ask yourself why, because the two worst things are hate and greed, and WE ALL KNOW IT.

A thousand times this.