04-07-2021, 12:48 PM
(04-05-2021, 12:13 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Why is Michigan getting hit so hard? Is it happening in Detroit and Flint?
A few days ago I saw an encounter between a middle-aged woman and an unmasked couple with small children at a Meijer. The middle-aged woman tore into the parents for not wearing masks. It seemed over the top, but she was right. I found out later that she is a physician and she has seen people die of COVID-19. The young couple is a pair of anti-vaxxers....
The people who don't wear masks are generally to the right-of-center, often fundamentalist Christians who take their chances with COVID-19 as a test of faith (to which I say... don't test God with personal stupidity!). There are also the militia-sympathizing types who think that Donald Trump really did win the 2020 election but got cheated. They greatly distrust formal learning that they think a corrupting influence hostile to faith and "common sense". Marxism (political and cultural), evolution, atheism, homosexuality, Black Lives Matter, Antifa...
Whatever liberal wing existed within the Republican Party in Michigan is gone. It appeals now largely to the most primitive drives in human nature. Trump signs and banners are still up in rural areas... this is after the January 6 Putsch.
Stupidity is not a survival value except if it allows one to keep a job in a precarious economy... Michigan is the definitive Rust Belt State (or is it Ohio?) where factory work has been vanishing and college graduates expect to hold onto the near-minimum-wage jobs that they had while working their way through college. A hint: Texas road maps sell well in East Lansing and Ann Arbor. Rural areas are doing OK because Trump opened the spigot on crop subsidies in a barely-disguised effort to buy votes in the next election. It came close to working in Michigan.
Remember well: people have been caught in a plot to kidnap and probably kill the Governor. it is a hare-brained plot, but those plots often culminate in great tragedy.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.