Totenkindly
@.~*virinaĉo*~.@
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People Are Hiding That Their Unvaccinated Loved Ones Died of COVID
With the arrival of vaccines, compassion for COVID deaths began to dry up, sometimes replaced by scorn.
In 2020, dying of COVID-19 was widely seen as an unqualified tragedy. It was the beginning of the pandemic, when it felt as if the entire world was in a state of collective grief. There was a palpable, shared mourning for all the lives gone too soon: the smiling mothers and jokester grandfathers and so-and-so from church who always lent a helping hand. All victims of a virus, unfurling and cruel.
But that was before the vaccines. Before COVID deaths got caught up in a culture war.
Now the majority of COVID deaths are occurring among the unvaccinated, and many deaths are likely preventable. The compassion extended to the virus’s victims is no longer universal. Sometimes, in place of condolences, loved ones receive scorn...
I find it hard to feel compassion when people die unvaccinated IF they don't have a bona fide medical reason to not be vaccinated. Most of the excuses don't cut it -- and it reminds me too much of the ignorance I experienced in rural religious areas growing up -- maybe people are sounding like they have reasons, but deep down it's basically because they don't like being told what to do by someone outside their area.
Even when someone has been negligent, I've noticed in myself that it's easier to harsh on strangers (internally) then it is on people I actually know. Like, I know the people I went to high school with have been dying of COVID. A few somehow just managed to survive COVID after doing extensive hospital time. Even when their reasons are bad or negligent, I still end up feeling bad for them or their families because I already had a connection to them and can picture them in my head. It's a little harder to feel compassion for strangers who behaved irresponsibly (to me).
I don't really know how I feel about this article, at times where it seems to just make this a "culture war" thing. I don't really care about culture wars. I do care that someone chose to not take reasonable precautions that we've already done previously historically, that put themselves and others who are trying to take precautions at risk. Is it a culture war thing to want to see responsible people benefit from their precautions and to see irresponsible people not hurt the responsible? There's a lot of fear going around, and some of it is reasonable (my kid just had to rough it through COVID and he was even vaccinated -- I can't imagine how bad it would have been for him if he hadn't been), and it's easy to not have sympathy towards those who have belittled the folks taking reasonable precautions and then get sick.
I'm not the kind of person who would harass the grieving (like described in the article) because that seems wrong to me as well, but in terms of my personal sympathy, I don't feel a lot towards the person themselves if they refused to take care of themselves and others. If that is a source of shame or embarrassment, maybe it should also be a feeling of deep loss -- because one could have prevented that, and both they and their loved ones are suffering needlessly.
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