Stupid Pandemic Trash

As COVID-19 continues to spread, a lot of people have acted heroically. Healthcare personnel have cared for people with the virus at great risk to their own health. First responders have continued to do their jobs and interacted with the public, as have postal workers and other people who can’t work from home. Supermarket employees have risked their own health so we could all hoard stuff.

There have also been a lot of trashy and/or stupid people, and this is about them.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick last week advocated getting the country back to work despite the widespread stay-home orders and suggested older people like himself would be willing to sacrifice themselves to get the economy going again for their children and grandchildren. There was also some piece of trash who tweeted that it wasn’t worth it to shut down the economy for “2.5 percent of the population (who are) generally expensive to maintain and not productive.”

To be clear, these people are talking about sacrificing 8 million people to die alone in hospitals, gasping for air, so the stock market and GDP don’t drop too much. The thinking is these people are dead weight anyway. So who’s willing to sacrifice themselves or their elderly family members for the economy? Anyone?

I can’t see you but I assume you’re not raising your hand, and neither am I. That’s because we’re not sociopaths. Their argument is trash and deserves no further debate.

President Trump also wants everybody to go back to work right away to get the economy going again so we can sit down to a nice Easter ham in a few weeks. This ignores all advice from epidemiologists and experts about doing social distancing (which is really only in its second week) to flatten the curve of COVID-19. I’d like to get the economy going again, too—those new unemployment numbers are terrifying. But if people go back to work too early, it would be profoundly stupid. Many, many more people would die, and that would further overwhelm the hospitals, which would kill the doctors and nurses we need to save us, which would destroy our economy anyway.

Oh, but we’d all have a beautiful Easter parade before sharing a ventilator with seven other people! Wow, look at all the pastel fascinators! So pretty!

What a stupid, stupid man. It’s terrifying that Trump could pull this Easter deadline out of his ass—you could tell by the way he mentioned it that it was a casual musing that took root in his brain—and people will believe him. Look at that guy who died after ingesting a chemical to prevent COVID-19 after Trump offhandedly mentioned it. Luckily, he can’t order everyone back to work. That responsibility lies with the hopefully saner governors.

Then you have those trashbag senators who attended classified briefings on the coronavirus and then dumped their stocks in travel and other industries that would be affected. This netted them a couple million while many of their constituents in the service industry found themselves brutally and suddenly unemployed. I don’t believe for a second that they were innocently selling stocks that would benefit them. How did their brokers know what to trade? They should be investigated by the Ethics Committee and the SEC for insider trading.

Speaking of pandemic profiteering, there’s also those assholes who bought thousands of dollars of hand sanitizer and tried to gouge people for them. Now they’re crying that they’re out thousands of dollars and are facing legal trouble. Thoughts and prayers!

Then there are the idiots on spring break from Dunning-Kruger University who figured nothing bad would ever happen to them and partied on the beach and all these other places en masse. There were the dumb assholes who had a coronavirus party. You have people licking toilets to prove some kind of point. (The only point I can see is that they’ve publicly confirmed they’re the type of people who lick toilets. You sure owned us!)

And I don’t want to read any more condescending articles by young people who roll their eyes about Baby Boomers not taking social distancing seriously. I think if you study those spring break photos closely, you’ll see there weren’t too many people there born between 1946 and 1964.

But you do you, Generation Y/Z/whatever! Don’t let people who know what they’re talking about tell you what to do! USA! USA!