Fascinating take, except that, as with functioning civilization in general, there actually are rewards.
People putting away grocery carts means that we can drive into the parking lot without carts everywhere. Putting away the carts responsibly means that we can walk toward the store entrance with a lessened chance of being hit by a rolling loose cart, or by a car as we focus on the cart to try to evade or catch the cart. It means there are maximized parking spaces for our cars, and our cars are less likely to be dinged, scraped, and dented.
We do this simple act, most of us, because it redounds to everyone’s benefit including our own. This illustrates the public good in simple form.
Those who won’t put away their carts are the anti-social, who are too stupid or sociopathic, or both, to comprehend the benefits to themselves as to others. This is in truth a perfect litmus test of which people are too uncivilized to function in society. There is no effective governance for people like this, self-governance or otherwise, as long as they are like this. That’s why the traditional remedy in most governances usually comes down to forced exile from society.
Now we do have another version of a litmus test, which is wearing a mask in this pandemic. It’s easier now to see the anti-social among us than it has ever been before, between the MAGA caps and the gun appendages. Now added is the absence of masks. Influenced and shaped by the anti-social tenets inherent in Republicon ideologies, there are far too many of these people.
Those who wear a mask do, in fact, protect both themselves and others. Cutting down transmission is to everyone’s benefit, just as walking through a society awash with the coronavirus is a danger to everyone, masked or not, since masks available to the public are not completely effective.
If use of masks were universal, the point is that, in combination with social distancing and hand hygiene, masks are effective enough to control the spread of the virus manageably overall.
The difference between grocery carts and masks is that there is the higher likelihood of personal, directly resulting consequences. The people who routinely fail to put carts away may or may not ever be personally inconvenienced.
It’s the same with the infection of guns in this country, another profoundly rampant anti-social symptom. Some gun owners and gun families are harmed by their own guns, but the chances are highest that guns will inflict harm to others.
The refusal to wear masks carries a greater likelihood of personal consequences for anti-social people, or at least their families and their own social groupings. Unfortunately, the virus also presents as a sloppy, inexact, unjustly applied death penalty to others.
People who find masks offensive or burdensome don’t have to wear a mask. As long as they stay home.
But when the anti-social mingle in society, they are wrong, unwanted, repellent, and a danger to themselves as well as others. This is as we can see, especially with the greater number of militantly anti-social people, united in this peculiar anti-social determination.
The virus, in a perverse way, may be what this miasmic country needs in order to begin to heal, if that can ever happen. The tragedy is the toll on the vulnerable, but that’s the way it has always been. The difference now, though, is that more and more of us, everyone, in fact, is vulnerable to the coronavirus. It makes the problem of widespread anti-social individuals potentially, partially, self-correcting, through personalized education by illness, or social exile through death.
annaxmalina
jacobvanloon
janainaart
stormborns
germansingergirl
