Just got my Covid booster.
Great experience at the local CVS: Wonderful staff, nice conversation with others who were relieved to receive their booster.
Fighting against the pandemic could have been a great effort of communal solidarity. Shame on those who keep sabotaging it.
Great experience at the local CVS: Wonderful staff, nice conversation with others who were relieved to receive their booster.
Fighting against the pandemic could have been a great effort of communal solidarity. Shame on those who keep sabotaging it.
Getting the vaccine feels great. Not just because it protects me - but because acting in solidarity with the community, helping to keep others safe in a very concrete and direct way is wonderful. It puts me in an almost festive mood: I’m doing my part, we’re doing this together!
Considering that conservatives talk about communal values and the Common Good all the time, claiming to be the bulwark against a liberal cult of selfish individuality, it is doubly shameful that they simply cannot bring themselves to embrace this as a patriotic effort.
That’s why the American Right’s decision to go all Culture War on the pandemic is so devastatingly revealing: The only thing the conservative movement in general and the Republican Party in particular really value is the maintaining of hierarchies.
The inability to see collective action problems as anything but an inconvenience, the complete lack of solidarity with people who don’t reflect their own image back at them, the disdain for public policy - it all combined to make conservatives entirely unwilling to do their part.
It didn’t have to be this way. But it’s also not a coincidence that we are where we are. The American Right has been on this trajectory for decades, and considering the enormous collective action problems we face, that’s an utter disaster for the country, and the whole world.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
