What the therapist doesn’t understand is that the anger is not just about mom dying. It’s about how everyone around this person failed them in a moment of danger, and as a result of that her mom died a horrible death. And even later, her society was collectively unable to acknowledge its behavior and the consequences it had.
I did not lose my mom but I did work in a hospital as a physician throughout the pandemic. I remember the ICU being full from Covid patients to the point that the hospital had to open new sections up and nurses working overtime to accommodate all of the sick. Then I would leave the hospital after providing care to all of these sick and dying people… and go to the grocery store where everyone was refusing to even mask up and I would see ghoulish politicians who were talking about how it was a hoax. I could see this catastrophe happening in front of my own eyes and everyone around me just wanted to pretend it was fake.
I didn’t suffer the loss this woman did but those terrible experiences and the feeling that my community had completely failed its members forever changed how I see people and the society I live in. So yeah, I get why she is still mad.
Sometime last year, I heard someone say something to the effect of “I think the pandemic had a pretty major effect on all of us,” and for a moment I thought “honestly I think I got through it fairly unscathed” because I was only considering my tolerance for the disruption to my life at the time. I was in a financially secure position and had plenty of social contact with friends through online gaming. I never felt any more depressed than normal throughout “quarantine” insofar as we even had one. Got my vaccines. Never tested positive. Didn’t lose anyone close to me (to the illness). Overall, I thought I’d made it through pretty alright.
Then I thought for just a few seconds more and I realized that the pandemic is what caused me to literally give up on humanity. Seeing how little everyone cared about anyone who was actually affected. People making posts online about how it was “fake” when people all over the world were dying. The ones who refused to wear a mask. Such a simple fucking request. Put this cloth over your face for a while and you can help not get people killed, but they still wouldn’t do it. I lived in a more rural area at the time, so it took a while for things to get really bad there. I remember thinking “you idiots will change your tune when it’s your grandmother dying” and then they just didn’t… Their own friends and family dying around them and most just slid further into conspiracy and paranoia.
The whole experience just fundamentally reshaped what I believe about humans and I don’t think anything will ever be able to switch things back. It reminds me of the scene in Terminator where John Connor says “We’re not gonna make it are we? People, I mean.”
Just a quiet resignation to the reality that left with nothing more than our own devices and all the resources we’d need to persist until the heat death of the universe, we’ll likely end up going extinct due to something completely preventable and probably caused by us. We choose our own destruction.
I didn’t feel this way before covid. I used to believe we’d eventually figure things out. Not anymore.
I worked at a nursing home at that time. So many people died or were impacted, an entire wing got shut down because of how many patients were lost. It then re-opened to be exclusively for Covid patients.
My grandma died there. I was the last relative to see her alive. The day before she passed, I called all of my aunts/uncles, siblings, and some of my cousins (the ones closest to her) so they could say their goodbyes. As anyone who’s worked with dying patients knows, sometimes people cling on and suffer in a terminal state until they get closure from a relative giving them “permission” to let go. I had to be that person. I told her that it’s okay, that we all love her and we understand. Although she appeared catatonic, right after I said that, a tear rolled down her eye. I think she heard me and understood, though there’s no way to really know. It was a hard day. She passed the next morning.
My wife worked in ICU then COVID ICU. She still gets PTSD flashbacks from everything she dealt with when someone comes in with similar symptoms. I got front row tickets to seeing a person who’s entire job is to keep people alive go from “oh someone I had today coded and we couldn’t bring them back” every so often to “we had multiple people die today. A few more aren’t much longer. If we put them on their back, they’ll die. If we give them water, they’ll choke and die. They still refuse to believe that COVID is real as they are actively suffering and dying of it”.
Yeah, we get a touch testy when people say it was fake or overblown
My thought was that staying home and self medicate is better choice than ICU. Virus is new, nobody knows how to treat it properly, too many sick people and not enough doctors. Everybody sick thus constant exposure to virus and other patalogies that came from weakened immune system. And I did a right thing forcing parents to stay at home.
It bothers me to this day that people thought it was a hoax. A lot of people I knew who thought it was a hoax wound up catching Covid, though none of them were hospitalized over it, which honestly kinda sucks because it means they didn’t learn their lesson.
Found out a few coworkers thought it was a hoax and casually brought up how it not only almost killed me, the guy I caught it from (a vocal antivaxxer!) DID die. I know dozens of people hospitalized and dozens more who suffered. I had jobs canceled because the client died.
They both worked office (then WFH) jobs during COVID. I worked 55+ hours a week in people’s homes and businesses. Who do you think has a better idea of the reality of the situation?
One of the doctors I worked with bought into the craziness and was arguing with the hospital about vaccines and masks even as our ICU was about to burst. Then his wife caught it and ended up in the ICU as a patient. He still did not change his mind despite her being in the hospital, and this was a physician.
I guess what I’m saying is they still probably wouldn’t have learned. I don’t mean to be so pessimistic but propaganda is so powerful.
Michael Shermer said this a long time ago but he said, “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”
I was routinely being sent to places like Texas to work during the pandemic because they didn’t care. It made me so mad being down there and getting made fun of for wearing a mask when where I live, you couldn’t go into any building without one.
@greatwhitebuffalo41 I know the feeling. I walked around Texas with a bunch of fucking idiots who couldn’t be bothered to accommodate the sick and helpless. At least I did my part and wore a mask.
It still isn’t. People still get Covid and Post Covid and governments are telling all these chronically ill people that they’re “lazy” and must work 40 hours a week or lose their insurance, pensions, etc.
What the therapist doesn’t understand is that the anger is not just about mom dying. It’s about how everyone around this person failed them in a moment of danger, and as a result of that her mom died a horrible death. And even later, her society was collectively unable to acknowledge its behavior and the consequences it had.
I did not lose my mom but I did work in a hospital as a physician throughout the pandemic. I remember the ICU being full from Covid patients to the point that the hospital had to open new sections up and nurses working overtime to accommodate all of the sick. Then I would leave the hospital after providing care to all of these sick and dying people… and go to the grocery store where everyone was refusing to even mask up and I would see ghoulish politicians who were talking about how it was a hoax. I could see this catastrophe happening in front of my own eyes and everyone around me just wanted to pretend it was fake.
I didn’t suffer the loss this woman did but those terrible experiences and the feeling that my community had completely failed its members forever changed how I see people and the society I live in. So yeah, I get why she is still mad.
Sometime last year, I heard someone say something to the effect of “I think the pandemic had a pretty major effect on all of us,” and for a moment I thought “honestly I think I got through it fairly unscathed” because I was only considering my tolerance for the disruption to my life at the time. I was in a financially secure position and had plenty of social contact with friends through online gaming. I never felt any more depressed than normal throughout “quarantine” insofar as we even had one. Got my vaccines. Never tested positive. Didn’t lose anyone close to me (to the illness). Overall, I thought I’d made it through pretty alright.
Then I thought for just a few seconds more and I realized that the pandemic is what caused me to literally give up on humanity. Seeing how little everyone cared about anyone who was actually affected. People making posts online about how it was “fake” when people all over the world were dying. The ones who refused to wear a mask. Such a simple fucking request. Put this cloth over your face for a while and you can help not get people killed, but they still wouldn’t do it. I lived in a more rural area at the time, so it took a while for things to get really bad there. I remember thinking “you idiots will change your tune when it’s your grandmother dying” and then they just didn’t… Their own friends and family dying around them and most just slid further into conspiracy and paranoia.
The whole experience just fundamentally reshaped what I believe about humans and I don’t think anything will ever be able to switch things back. It reminds me of the scene in Terminator where John Connor says “We’re not gonna make it are we? People, I mean.”
Just a quiet resignation to the reality that left with nothing more than our own devices and all the resources we’d need to persist until the heat death of the universe, we’ll likely end up going extinct due to something completely preventable and probably caused by us. We choose our own destruction.
I didn’t feel this way before covid. I used to believe we’d eventually figure things out. Not anymore.
I worked at a nursing home at that time. So many people died or were impacted, an entire wing got shut down because of how many patients were lost. It then re-opened to be exclusively for Covid patients.
My grandma died there. I was the last relative to see her alive. The day before she passed, I called all of my aunts/uncles, siblings, and some of my cousins (the ones closest to her) so they could say their goodbyes. As anyone who’s worked with dying patients knows, sometimes people cling on and suffer in a terminal state until they get closure from a relative giving them “permission” to let go. I had to be that person. I told her that it’s okay, that we all love her and we understand. Although she appeared catatonic, right after I said that, a tear rolled down her eye. I think she heard me and understood, though there’s no way to really know. It was a hard day. She passed the next morning.
My wife worked in ICU then COVID ICU. She still gets PTSD flashbacks from everything she dealt with when someone comes in with similar symptoms. I got front row tickets to seeing a person who’s entire job is to keep people alive go from “oh someone I had today coded and we couldn’t bring them back” every so often to “we had multiple people die today. A few more aren’t much longer. If we put them on their back, they’ll die. If we give them water, they’ll choke and die. They still refuse to believe that COVID is real as they are actively suffering and dying of it”.
Yeah, we get a touch testy when people say it was fake or overblown
My thought was that staying home and self medicate is better choice than ICU. Virus is new, nobody knows how to treat it properly, too many sick people and not enough doctors. Everybody sick thus constant exposure to virus and other patalogies that came from weakened immune system. And I did a right thing forcing parents to stay at home.
It bothers me to this day that people thought it was a hoax. A lot of people I knew who thought it was a hoax wound up catching Covid, though none of them were hospitalized over it, which honestly kinda sucks because it means they didn’t learn their lesson.
Found out a few coworkers thought it was a hoax and casually brought up how it not only almost killed me, the guy I caught it from (a vocal antivaxxer!) DID die. I know dozens of people hospitalized and dozens more who suffered. I had jobs canceled because the client died.
They both worked office (then WFH) jobs during COVID. I worked 55+ hours a week in people’s homes and businesses. Who do you think has a better idea of the reality of the situation?
One of the doctors I worked with bought into the craziness and was arguing with the hospital about vaccines and masks even as our ICU was about to burst. Then his wife caught it and ended up in the ICU as a patient. He still did not change his mind despite her being in the hospital, and this was a physician.
I guess what I’m saying is they still probably wouldn’t have learned. I don’t mean to be so pessimistic but propaganda is so powerful.
Michael Shermer said this a long time ago but he said, “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”
I was routinely being sent to places like Texas to work during the pandemic because they didn’t care. It made me so mad being down there and getting made fun of for wearing a mask when where I live, you couldn’t go into any building without one.
@greatwhitebuffalo41 I know the feeling. I walked around Texas with a bunch of fucking idiots who couldn’t be bothered to accommodate the sick and helpless. At least I did my part and wore a mask.
“Southern hospitality” my ass.
Yeah was not a good time to be honest.
It still isn’t. People still get Covid and Post Covid and governments are telling all these chronically ill people that they’re “lazy” and must work 40 hours a week or lose their insurance, pensions, etc.
Yeah and don’t forget about long covid. Ugh
There’s now long covid (up to 6 weeks after getting sick, when you might still have covid) and post covid (6 plus weeks).