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 stepdad, who has MS, across the state of Pennsylvania for his first dose of the vaccine; they’ll have to make the same trip again this month for the second dose. When I qualified for the shot, I walked to a Brooklyn clinic and walked out, vaccinated, in 20 minutes.
This week I saw a woman get mad at the vaccine scammers with a tweet perfectly designed to set off every single person on my Twitter feed at once. “I hope you’re having a great evening,” she tweeted. “I can tell by people’s increasingly cavalier restaurant Instagrams which healthy young rich assholes scammed their way into an early vaccine and I will seethingly hold it against each of them until I draw my last breath. God bless!” This…
