A couple of weeks ago, the Atlantic pushed a piece arguing that the Great Crankiness is due to unprocessed grief over COVID. That might be, but I think there’s something else involved too: guilt. Put simply, as this study lays out in detail, a lot of people behaved poorly during the pandemic.
I don’t mean people who were confused about what to do–that’s understandable and certainly forgivable. But the 32 percent of people, for example, who didn’t get tested when they thought they might have COVID because that would increase the known prevalence of COVID (and public officials then might do something about that) or the 46 percent who wanted “to exercise the freedom to do what I want”–well, they have things to answer for. There’s no hanging back when you have over one million dead. Nobody’s perfect, but there are a lot of people who behaved poorly repeatedly, know they did so, and are furiously (figuratively and literally) trying to rationalizing away their cognitive dissonance.
They also might feel grief, but it’s the grief of the Confederate soldier, not the Union soldier.
mikethemadbiologist
You are on to something there
The Atlantic, missing the point because it is sharp and touchy.
Not sure my lost respect counts for anything, though.
Models indicate that the number of dead Americans from the pandemic is off by a factor of 2.5-2.7. A more accurate number is 3M. This number is supported by the economic data and that too many states lied about most of the data they gathered and reported during the pandemic, particularly in 27 Red States.
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I do not think that this is guilt. I think that this is actual brain injury.