The vast, maskless divide!

Well it was a long, harrowing drive, but I'm glad to be home and-huh? You didn't notice I'd gone radio silent for like a week? I'll uh...I'll try not to take that personally. Anyway, I just completed a four day drive across country back to my adoptive home of California after being gone for more than a year. Long story, you don't care, I just wanted to talk a little bit about what I noticed while passing through half a dozen states during a pandemic, twice. 

Above: literally any point along this drive.

What? Not only is that comparison fair,
it's also apt. If anyone knows STD's...

Usually around this time of year, I'm off to Burning Man which--don't judge me--anyway, it doesn't matter because it's been canceled because of COVID. Again. Well, more precisely because dumbs turned some simple precautions like wearing a mask and getting a life-saving vaccine into a weird political issue. Because Trump. Yeah, I blame him for a lot of things and in a sense that's oversimplifying. That's like blaming open sores instead of herpes or the decisions that led you to herpes. 

Above: a crowd of people angry at, yet
lacking a working definition of, socialism.

My point is that the thing that's actually killing us as a nation is divisiveness. Well, ok, and a virus. And I-huh? No, COVID, not herpes, but I can see where you--doesn't matter. Where I'm going with is that I don't mean divisiveness in the both sides-y, the solution is somewhere in the middle sense. I mean divisiveness in the sense that one side hates the other so much that they're listening to junk science and endangering their own kids (and the rest of us for that matter) because actual science is librul and they'd rather die than let the socialists win. 

First of all, I asked you not to judge me.
Secondly, it's not like I said Coachella.

I mention this because on this trip back to California, like the drive I did back in 2020 to New York, masks were few and far between everywhere in the emptiness that is the states in between and I blame them. You know, for the fact that we're still talking about COVID in the present sense. Granted, this is just based on observation and my sample size when gauging the vast, maskless divide in America was limited to the gas stations that line Interstate 80, but holy shit, if they'd just get with the program, we could all go to Burning Man again.

And the most frustrating thing--ok, apart from the death toll, the continued need to mask, and the crushing economic repercussions of a sustained crisis--forget it. A frustrating thing about all of this, is that very same people who can't stop shrieking about how that they have a God-given right to military-grade weapons to protect themselves and their families are often the least likely to get the damn vaccine.

They know they can't shoot the virus, right?