Breaking: Former President Trump says he will rehire all former members of the military who were discharged for refusing the SARS-COV-2 vaccine. They will receive back pay and an apology.
Corporations should be required to follow this same example.
A quarter of parents lied about whether their children were following COVID-19 public health measures (PHM), including misrepresenting vaccination status and falsifying the age of their children, a recent study has found.
Just got this (in part) from a friend of mine, and I.... what???
Well, aside from these being TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES....
The amount of mental gymnastics it takes to deal with this x.x *grumbles myself into oblivion*
Personally, I couldn't care less about what the government says. I lean heavily on what frontline workers say. I worked in the medical field for over 10 years and my SIL is a respiratory therapist. I've seen a chunk of the dark underbelly that is the pandemic. Government just so happens to support (kind of... ish...) what frontline workers and experts say and pushes what it can on the state/federal level to get things done. That's why I support mandates and public health plans like masks and vaccines and social distancing. I don't blindly say "well if the government says so" to whatever comes along. There's a lot of things they did horribly, especially in the beginning. But we can't fix a public health crisis without government and global assistance and cooperation. And if I ever want to understand the reasons for a mandate or a safeguard, healthcare workers are where I go first. So just do me a solid and jot that down.
In CACW Steve was not against government regulation, he was against taking the first willy-nilly psudo-solution dropped into the Avengers' laps just to get back into the good graces of the public. The only possible correlation to Covid with this would be if we had gone with what we were first told in February 2020: "oh lol I guess there's this weird virus popping up, but they're probably going to shut down flights in and out of the country for a few weeks so it's nothing we need to worry about" and stuck with that all this time. Oh man, remember those days? Thing is, we did do what covid deniers said we should do in the beginning: nothing.
Steve wanted more time to make decisions in order to foster a better relationship between enhanced individuals and those in power who are responsible when things go south. He refused to be forced into them out of misplaced emotion and desperation. The fine print matters. His priority has always been to support public safety. It's why in every conflict you can see him actively going out of his way to limit and mitigate the damage they cause. Is he perfect at it? No. Does he care that he isn't? Yes. Steve also knew the Accords were not drawn up in a day, and there was a reason its creation was kept from them. He wanted, at the very least, to be part of any decision making, part of the solution, and even to help write that two inch thick book that got thrown at them at the last moment. He didn't even get so far as the option to. When Covid first really started to haul in, no one had a clue what was going on. People were dying, hospitals were overflowing, the chain of commerce was in shambles, and quite literally everyone was scrambling for answers. The start of Covid is not comparable to the start of CACW. At all.
Steve would have been on the ball had he felt the Accords was actually for everyone's collective good, and not just certain people who had more than a small chance of wanted the leash to a private military force to do with as they pleased. Not only that, but the Accords does not come close to addressing the sheer monumental scale of global public safety like Covid regulations do (or try to), it was about international control over enhanced individuals; when they could do things, how they could do things, why they could do things, and every personal freedom they, and they alone, would be forced to give up in order to continue saving the world (an optional career choice). A handful of people in a world of billions. It was a conflict of interest, heavily discriminatory, and a smoking gun in the wrong hands, sure, but isolated. Like a car wreck on the highway. If you're not directly involved, at most all you can do at is watch it, discuss it, meme it, and move on with little to no further thought about it.
Covid affects everyone alike, regardless of your political affiliation, religion, employment, gender, age, where you live, etc. It's killed and permanently debilitated infants, young children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly. It's killed disabled people with a laundry list of health problems, and it's killed healthy 25 year olds in the prime of their lives. No one can avoid the reach of it unless they live in the mountains. If the Accords had been intended for literally every person alive and we all witnessed it's creation from first word to final draft, you can bet your life savings everything in CACW would have gone much, much differently. It is not comparable in the slightest.
And even as things were, Steve almost signed when Tony said they could amend the Accords and help Bucky. Steve picked up the pen. What stopped him was finding out that Wanda was under house arrest for no reason--No. Reason.--other than Tony felt it was a good idea to protect her by detaining her against her will. And that's exactly what Steve was afraid of. When it comes to Covid regulations, people are still subject to the rule of law, and you have your basic human rights. A right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, right to work and education, etc. But it's not a perfect system. What do you do when allowing you your right to freedom of expression/opinion infringes on someone else's right to life? It's not enough to ask everyone to just be careful and mindful of their fellow human beings. Clearly. You can tell someone "hey I'm sensitive to loud noises could you please keep your voice down" and be met with "WHY ARE YOU TONE POLICING I HAVE A RIGHT TO YELL IF I WANT TO." Giving people the "right" to decide whether they want to care or not care about their fellow man is exactly how we got here. Mandates, like laws, are in place so one person's idiocy has less of a chance of killing someone else.
The difference between the willingness to coexist--understanding there needs to be an equity in how rights and needs are met--and the insistence to personal freedoms--over and above collective freedoms--is insane. There are compromises, but the personal freedom side seems to think a mask and a vaccine mandate is an equivalent injustice to dying of a 100% preventable viral disease. And every time I hear that comparison, it makes me want to yeet myself into the sun. Wish I could feel like we left eugenics in the past but nope, it's alive and well.
The entirety of CACW gave a snapshot of the Avengers' lives. It covers the span of less than a week. Covid, as I write this in Jan 2022, has been going on for over two years. If someone has better suggestions for public safety, frontline worker support, and options for the millions upon millions of people who have died and will continue to die, I'd love to hear them. But instead we're constantly stuck listening to endless criticism of the way things are being done, while simultaneously doing nothing to help or change that. It's infuriating. When those who demand everyone value the life of a fetus refuse to extend the same value to the life of an autonomous human being, I lose my mind a little more.
The problem with comparing Covid mandates to what Team Cap was up against with the Accords is seeing Team Cap purely as an opposition to governing authority, which is entirely missing the point of what their motivations and goals were. Team Cap is about protecting the rights of everyone, and not standing by when very obviously discriminatory and exceptionally dangerous policies are made. The demand for individual rights during a global pandemic comes at the cost of ignoring every voice snuffed out after begging people to be careful and the voices of those who are doing everything they can to keep those of us who are left safe. Ignoring a public health crisis doesn't sound like Team Cap to me at all. Steve never once said "I don't understand why you're overreacting about this, only 20 people died in Lagos and they probably lied on the report anyway to make it sound worse than it is. What about the thousands we left alive?" he said "people died, and that's on me." Every death hits him hard. He did not ignore the other side of the equation. He didn't say the threat wasn't there, or that people were being unreasonable about what they rose up with concerns about how the Avengers conducted themselves. What he said was that if he were going to be held to the expectations of someone else outside the Avengers, he wanted to know what their agenda was first. The first option given doesn't, and shouldn't, have to be the only one. He refused to place blind faith in an untrusted and unproven authority, and when push came to shove, he ensured that authority could not kill anyone [just because], even when it did in the end cost him his freedom.
The thing is, nothing done will ever seem important or realistic when you don't believe bad things are happening. Team Cap could have walked away and saved themselves so much pain and suffering, but they kept going. They knew what they were risking taking action, and they knew what they were risking of they did nothing. And even with all that, nothing they did came to an even remote degree of the impact Covid has had. Team Cap's actions had a very localized reach and potential for genuine injury, but they remained on the side of protecting life and rights first and foremost. One death does not justify another. Every human has the right to due process, even if they are guilty. And the death toll in CACW did not reach into the hundreds of thousands like Covid has. It was not a threat to the health and safety of every person in every community on every continent on this planet. Every time someone dies from complications that arise in full or in part because of Covid, the chasm between the two sides of "you're infringing on my rights" and "we have to do something" gets deeper.
And seeing Covid mandates repeatedly compared to some of the worst atrocities our world has ever seen is something else... I can't even articulate the level of rage it makes me feel. And when the rage ebbs, it just makes me intensely sad.
us younger people were sold the idea that getting the vaccine helps protect the more vulnerable people who maybe can't get it for whatever reason (like ya know, people getting chemo who have lowered immune systems).
So I got the vaccine, I may be anti mandate, but I'm down to get stabbed in the arm
And you know what happened?
both my parents (who are in their 60s) got covid, my brother(also vaccinated) got covid and I GOT COVID
The vaccine did jack squat to prevent me from getting covid, which means I passed it ON TO MY PARENTS
There absolutely shouldn't be so much pressure to get something that is essentially useless.
not to mention the "no vaccine no entry" mandates for bars and restaurants will only cause communities with a majority of minorities to be thrown further into poverty but whatever I guess people don't care about that.
Just a reminder that the people who supposedly care so much about your health put young people who tested positive for covid (with virtually no risk of being hospitalized or dying) into nursing homes (with people who have the highest risk of dying). And they were well aware of this at the time.
