Our Long Year of Being Mad at Each Other Online
Vaccine scolding is the perfect end to a pandemic year full of personal judgments
No matter how you’ve conducted yourself over the past year, someone has decided that the way you’re handling the pandemic is wrong. This judgment, anger, and confusion stem from the fact that nobody at any level of government is providing us with specific guidelines for conducting our behavior, so in absence of any real leadership, we’re all becoming snitches.
We got mad at runners for running, even while masked! Then we got mad at people for going to parks, posting pictures of people who wanted to relax on a patch of grass after being confined to their homes. We were mad at people who left New York and told them not to return, but then some of the people who were mad left New York, so I guess it’s fine to leave now? The way you’re layering your masks, assuming you’re even going the extra mile to wear two, is also possibly wrong. And now we’re mad at people for getting the vaccine!
The vaccine rollout in the United States embodies all of the inequities and failures of American health care, politics, and bureaucracy distilled into one perfectly frustrating moment. My mom, who would qualify for a vaccine in New York but doesn’t in her state of Pennsylvania, had to drive my…
