Your COVID politics can be lethal

So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. - Ephesians 4:25

 It Makes No Sense

We have a raging pandemic. Now is the time to put political differences aside for the health and well-being of everyone. But not if you've sipped the Kool-Aid of Trump's Republican Party. Loyalty to the Trump line is of paramount importance to these people. And...The needs of the individual trump all needs, even if such assertions are against their best interests. 

I didn't have to go back too far to find precedent for the desire to die of COVID for a political cause.

One of the key takeaways from the 2016 election was the frustration of a widening group of lower middle income white Americans. Trump's message was particularly appealing to this group. There is a growing unease as the middle class is excluded as more wealth is concentrated in the upper caste. The stress is having a negative effect. Life span expectancy has dropped two years for white males.

In the book Caste, written by Isabel Wilkerson, asserts the widening gap is causing an increasing group of disaffected Americans. 

From the book: 

"Exclusion cost lives, up and down the hierarchy. The physician Jonathan M. Metzel, who has conducted research into the health of disaffected whites in middle America, has measured the life and death consequences of state decisions to withhold benefits seen as helping undeserving minority groups. In the state of Tennessee he found restrictive health policies may haver cost the lives of almost 4,600 African-Americans between 2011 and 2015, but also cost the lives of as many as 12,000 white Tennesseans, more than double the loss sustained by black residents."

"In his book, Dying of Whiteness, Metzel told of the case of a forty-one-year-old white taxi driver who was suffering from an inflamed liver. His life obviously threatened. Because the Tennessee legislature had neither taken up the Affordable Care Act nor expanded Medicaid coverage, the man was unable to get the expensive, lifesaving treatment that would have been available to him had he lived across the border in Kentucky. As he approached death, he stood by the conviction that he did not want the government involved."

"No way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens, he told Metzel." Ain't no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it. I would rather die."

"And sadly, so he would." 

We see the same sad consequences playing out in red states today. Refusal to wear mask, refusal to keep social distancing, and refusal to get the vaccine. The Delta Variant is making the unvaccinated very ill. Yet, so many are sticking by their decision to refuse being vaccinated. A decision reinforced by misinformation fired by social media posts and conservative 'news' outlets. The argument might be something like, "If they make us take the vaccine, they'll be coming for our guns next!" 

Even Mitch McConnell is alarmed. He urging his constituencies to get the vaccine or risk shutting everything down again. Missing from this quote is mention of needless suffering , and needless death. I don't think they're listening.

The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other. - Kiese Laymon, Heavy (2018)