Been looking for some good news to share this morning and finding little. But there is some good snark.
Staring down the calendar at another winter of pandemic, President Joe Biden has some blunt words for Americans (CNN):
“For the unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated — for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death,” the President said.
He’d determined ahead of time that his message would be muddled if he answered any questions afterward, so he sat uncharacteristically silent as reporters peppered him on their way out.
[…]
Already, cases and hospitalizations are surging in some parts of the country, leading to a 31% increase in cases and a 20% increase in hospitalizations from two weeks ago.
Leaving his words hanging in the air was probably a good move on Biden’s part. People are pandemic-weary enough by now that Covid advice from officials begins to sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher, an unintelligible blurr of words. The fewer blunt ones there are, the more likely they are to stand out in the daily blurr.
There are daily more revelations of the depravity of one of our major political parties. Its leaders are under the car cutting the country’s brake lines and under the hood ripping out the spark plug wires. On the other side of the aisle, gifs of Charlie Brown taking another run at the football are circulating as Democrats keep trying to slip major legislation by its most obstreperous senators. News of climate change’s effects will soon become as much a blurr as the daily mass shooting. The weary are discarding their masks and discounting the mounting death toll.
Will God forgive us? Will we forgive ourselves for our creeping nihilism? asks Sarah Jones at New York Magazine.
Might need to go rewatch the Christmas episode of Ted Lasso.