RippedMan said: "From Alabama, and I've actually been pretty proud of how our Gov (R) has handled the crisis. Mask mandate, etc. We aren't all backwards rednecks. But keep judging away from your little island up North."
A rational response. Which I think tells of a truth that a lot of people don't want to hear. How unfair generalizations can be.
Let's face it, many will say welcome to Californians, but stay home those of you from FL or AL. Yet the death rates in CA and FL are virtually the same. Even though the latter opened up a lot sooner than CA did. What was going on here in CA, despite being in and out of lockdowns, still couldn't come up with much better numbers than FL.
Unfortunately this horrific pandemic had a lot of question marks surrounding it. And there were the naysayers who questioned it, fought the masks, the whole buzz. And I personally didn't agree with them. I felt we all had a responsibility to do our part. But interesting how two different approaches in FL and CA garnered basically the same results.
To play devil's advocate for a moment though, I would have to question those who say theatergoers are more likely to be the pro-maskers and pro-vaccine people. I see this as a bit of a generalization too.
I'm old enough to remember when the AIDS epidemic broke out. And when there were still a lot of questions as to how it could get passed from one person to another. Yet there were still a lot of guys not wearing condoms because it was an inconvenience, inhibited pleasure, whatever.
I had a discussion with a friend of mine who argued that AIDS, when it was sadly passed from one to another, was between two consenting adults. As if those were the only two potentially impacted by it. Her argument was that anti-maskers are potentially exposing a lot of people to it. Those with AIDS were not.
While I do agree with the potential spread of COVID by irresponsible people who refused to wear masks, I also remember having issues with a guy I would meet who didn't want to put on a condom.
There was a time when we didn't know how it got spread. There were still a lot of questions out there. What we did know is that certainly blood transfusions could spread it. So any irresponsible behavior could have led to some real problems with that had multiple people been infused with infected blood. Sputum we weren't sure about. But many guys were still digging their heels in. We were still living at a time when we didn't know if it just remained between two people.
Yet there were still those who didn't want to wear condoms. And still don't.
There will be those who say comparing the two is apples and oranges. But no it's not. It's about human responsibility. And those who are not willing to take precautions during a time when an outbreak of a serious virus/illness arises, and there is so much that we don't know.
Many don't want to be inconvenienced though. Be it about individual "freedoms," or something as simple as not wanting to inhibit pleasure. Either way, it's irresponsible.
