Yes, that’s a bit of an angry, unkind and vicious name-calling for a title!

I won’t try to defend it as justified, but I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to characterize what is happening with folks in our community, and, it seems, the nation as well. Much of what I see from folks who have been sucked into the “orange experiment”–as someone has dubbed the past few years–just seems to be blithering. Talking for effect and pandering to people who’ve abdicated their rational responsibility to critical thinking, evaluation, sorting through things for themselves. And not really making a whole lot of sense. That’s what I mean by blithering.

And they could fairly be called idiots in the sense that many of them just don’t really know much at all about what they’re blithering about. They haven’t bothered to look into the history, the scientific facts, even the reality of current reports floated on social media and propaganda masquerading as news sites, such as Fox News. They just take what someone they have decided to admire says as truth and repeat it without thought.

Locally we have just seen the impact of such blighted thinking on our school board.

The superintendent — responding to the CDC call and the obvious spike in COVID cases in our state and our county — had announced that masks would be required and caution would be exercised as school opens next week. Then the semi-republican echo chamber began to react to the idea of mask requirements, ranting and roaring about “standing up for our rights” and government mandates and other such phrases that have been put out to manipulate them. This week, the board held a special meeting and said the superintendent couldn’t mandate masks and school would be normal.

I want to call each of the four who voted to do this and ask, “Have you looked at the recent data?” Our county has seen rates go up by a factor of six times in the last few weeks, and the state has quadrupled its rate. We had four people in the hospital last week, this week we had 12 and in the past few days there have been 16 hospitalized. This is a tiny community and that’s a significant change. The curve is now going nearly straight up on that graph.

It is literally incomprehensible to me that people think that being asked to wear a mask in public is some kind of effort to exercise government control over their lives. They have long accepted that we expect kids to meet certain standards when they come to school, that we stop at red lights, that we follow laws and reasonable standards of behavior on the roads that make things work for everyone. That’s what this is. Not some violation of rights. The constitution doesn’t mention the right not to wear a mask

And then we have the true fascist, Florida governor DeSantis, who has ordered that any school district who does mandate masks will lose funding. So, being asked to wear a mask is infringing on someone’s rights, but the governor dictatorially mandating what a supposedly independent school board does is defending freedom? It truly boggles the mind the degree of twisted thinking, propagandized mentality required to think that way.

People who blast out about “standing up for our rights” by refusing to mask up or get vaccinated are somehow imagining themselves as some kind of hero. It’s really sad when there are so many places, so many issues that we truly need to stand up for our rights about, and these folks just don’t notice those things. Things like the blatant racism in our community, the inequity at the heart of the economic system, the injustice that is visited on poor or even middle class people every day by our legal system, homelessness and PSTD in our veteran population, hungry children and other issues that threaten to undermine the functioning of our democratic way of life — why are these people not worried about “standing up for our rights” on these issues?

I don’t blame social media for this turn of events, but it does seem to be making it worse. It gives people a platform to easily and freely spout un-researched, ill-considered notions that are absorbed without reflection by a numbed audience, all full of self-congratulatory blithering and self-righteous ignorance.

Candidates for local political office are “announcing” on social media platforms, reducing the political process to some kind of debased level of unhealthy posturing and attacks beyond even the low levels we’ve been seeing in TV political ads.

It’s all pretty discouraging to see. Especially as the pandemic threatens to once again disrupt daily life to an intolerable degree.