Some people are getting antsy.
That's the best (and kindest) way I know how to put it. After sheltering-in-place for over a month, crazy is starting to take over. That means that people who mistrust science (or outright reject it) are deciding to gather in protest. (That most of these gatherings look like white supremacist family reunions is a whole other issue.) And now we have the anti-vaccination people jumping on this band wagon, as well. All of them say that their rights are being violated by forced government shutdowns.
As a person who has been immunocompromised since the age of 13, let me explain something to these oppressed citizens of the United States. Your right to gather and spread this virus doesn't simply stay at your end of the gene pool. If you go swimming in a public pool and decide to piss in the water, your piss spreads through the entire pool, touching every person in it. That means that, eventually, everyone around you in that pool is covered in your urine.
That may seem like a funny analogy, but that is pretty much the way it works. So, dear oppressed citizens, I am not against you practicing your ignorance in ways that do not harm other people. Find some plot of land somewhere, away from everyone else, and stay there, sharing this virus freely with each other, pissing in your own swimming pools. And when you get sick, don't come to our hospitals seeking treatment. Because the the only cure for stupid is education, and that ship has already sailed for most of you.
I'm sorry if I sound angry, but I'm tired of people only thinking of themselves and their ability to go out and wear their stupid red hats and chant their racist slogans. There is another outbreak of Covid-19 coming. It will be worse than the first outbreak, if history serves as any indication. If we extrapolate from the lesson of the Spanish flu of 1918, two to five million people died during the first wave. In the second wave, it was 20 to 50 million deaths worldwide. As of today, May 3, 2020, the death total from Covid-19 in this country is around 66,000. That means, dear citizens of the United States, that the second wave of this pandemic could claim, conservatively, 660,000 lives in the coming months. And a good portion of those lives will be people who are already immunocompromised. People like me.
Now, I know this higher math and logic will not change the minds of anyone who storms into government buildings armed with guns. (By the way, these are not "good people.") It won't stop science-ignorant parents from letting their children play together in public spaces. Everyone has the right to be stupid in this country.
Saint Marty has just one simple request: keep your stupid asses out of Saint Marty's swimming pool, because he doesn't want to be coated in your urine.
Here's a poem that paints this picture a little more eloquently . . .
poem from Kyrie
by: Ellen Bryant Voigt
A large lake, a little island in it.
Winter comes to the island and the ice
forms along the shore--when the first got sick
others came in to nurse them and it spread,
ice reaching out from the island into the lake.
Of course, there was another, a larger shore--
Germany and Spain, New York, Atlanta,
ice also building toward the island.
By ice I'm thinking just those in the ground;
the sickness was more like brushfire in the clearing,
everyone beating the brush with coats and hands,
meanwhile the forest around us up in flames.
What was it like? It was small, I was sick,
I can't remember much--go study the graves.
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