Troubled person in a troubled time.
I suspect this woman would act this way in normal times… some people are just jerks who don’t care about others.
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Right? A lot of us are troubled in troubled times but manage not to assault people or literally spit on them. I’m all for compassion but bad behavior is still bad behavior.
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Exactly! This goes beyond her being troubled in troubling times… She’s being a jerk!
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Your theory makes as much sense as pretty much any other explanation for why these people think “owning the libs” is more important than guarding against infection of a deadly virus.
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plus one on that!
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There’s a part of me that still holds out some forlorn hope that they’ll learn their lesson; Continual spikes on the numbers, more and more of their friends falling ill, the ambient vibe of “word on the street”… something will eventually get through to these people. But if “not being left” is so essential to their identity, and wearing a mask is something they only ever see lefties do… Covid may become a permanant part of white identity in America, similar to how we’ve internalized HIV/AIDS.
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[NARRATOR: It wasn’t.]
While I am angry and sad about this, my experience with nurses is that they are people, too. They are paid like shit, treated like shit (especially by doctors, but often also by patients), they have to do really shit work (involving shit, among other bodily fluids) and they can have shit in their heads like everyone else.
I am not giving anyone a pass here, mind. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t the same amount of idiots, bigots and arseholes amongst them as among the rest of the population.
What I really, really cannot grasp, however, is that someone with a professional medical training who must be informed about why and how a mask is worn would not wear it correctly and give others shit about it. That’s a bit like being a taxi driver professionally and a wrong-way driver in private.
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Some armchair social psychology here: I suspect that quite a few, if not a majority, of these Karens are acting out “on behalf of” some offstage husband or boyfriend.
They’re reacting to general social pressure (if not individual pressure, or the pressure of personal material dependency) that says they have to be the caretakers / supporters / enablers of their beleaguered / belligerent men.
(It’s like how Melania Trump looks weirdly identical to her husband when they appear together in public photo-ops. She exactly mirrors his slitty-eyed grimace. Subsuming her identity to his.)
Actually this isn’t totally armchair speculation on my part – some of this follows from an extended conversation I had with a physical therapist the other day who described in detail how her sister seemed to be consistently going to bat on behalf of her MAGA-type husband, but primarily for his personal sake and not from any well-articulated conviction about COVID-19.
Do you want her coughing on you? Do you want her shopping at the same store as your honey, parents, grandparents or kids & coughing on them?
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Is your physical therapist also a psychiatrist/psychologist/social scientist? If not, then it’s speculation on both your parts.
Speaking as a white woman, belive me when I say that women, especially white women, are perfectly capable of being completely horrible people without the help or encouragement of any man. No need to try to find excuses.
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This pisses me off so much. At least from what I’ve seen, about 60% of people feel like the pandemic is over because they want it to be over, and no longer bother wearing masks at all. Of the remaining 40%, about half wear their masks without their nose covered, or around their neck like a fashion accessory. They apparently think a mask is a magical talisman that scares viruses when they see it, rather than a physical barrier that must be worn correctly to function. These people even include workers (and managers) in “masks are mandatory” stores.
Humanity isn’t even trying. We’re officially too stupid to live. I’m sure we’ll pull through the coronavirus eventually, after many completely preventable deaths, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we’re extinct within the next century from something more serious.
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You seem to want to give an ungenerous reading to what I wrote.
I did not suggest that any men were providing anything like “help and encouragement.” Those are your words.
And the therapist I spoke of (like you, a white woman) was directly reporting what her sister appeared to be doing. Probably she knows her sister better than you do.
Your position seems to imply that the issue of how peoples’ behavior can be heavily socially determined – which is the obvious meaning of what I wrote – is somehow not legitimate to bring up.
Which would mean that (e.g.) the many white guys I see walking around without masks these days really are being exactly the rugged individualists that they think they are being – and that the many more white women I see with masks are also rugged individualists.
That just doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t seem useful to deny that “social pressure” (those are my words), operating at whatever conscious or subconscious level, can really help someone along in the process of becoming a completely horrible person.
It sounds like the concern animating your response is that my argument was denying women their moral autonomy. Seriously, that’s not where I was trying to go.
It’s more like this: when you see someone “performing assholery” in public, it makes sense to ask which audience, in their mind, they’re performing assholery for.
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I was happier before this pandemic when I was much less acutely aware of how unbelievably selfish, stupid, and paranoid so many of my fellow countrywomen and men are.
Obviously it’s better to be aware of the evils that exist out there rather than being oblivious, but it has felt like being hit with a sledgehammer—this realization that so many of our own neighbors can’t bear to make even the smallest sacrifices for the good of the community.
Without a doubt the stories we’ve been told in school about Americans rallying together during national emergencies like WW2 et al have been romanticized and whitewashed to preserve the narrative of American hegemony and strength. Despite many of us knowing that, did anyone anticipate just how epically Americans would fail at demonstrating even the slightest concern for others during a seismic national emergency like a pandemic? Fucking fuck.
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The insistence on being in an indoor shared space without a mask, and furthermore shouting (and speaking at elevated volume even before it devolved into shouting), is quite enough on its own to want me and my loved ones nowhere near this person. No disagreement here.
The fake-sounding (but assaultive!) coughing is just the cherry on top of the sundae. But it’s really the sundae I find most worrying.
–
In terms of actual risk? It was probably in the same ballpark as the doordash-looking guy who came into the falafel shop when I was ordering lunch today to pick up a takeout order, striding in without a mask and standing no more than 2-3 feet off my shoulder. That happened today. Also in New York City.
Which was more than just annoying, but not quite at the point that I was going to shout at him or berate him, or beseech the store employees to enforce their clearly posted (and statewide!) rule. Which was actually oddly frustrating.
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You’re suggesting they have no minds of their own?
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Can we not and say we did? Such speculation is rarely helpful and only often serves to further the narrative that white people acting asocially must be mentally ill rather than just assholes.
Yes. AND women still have agency. Let’s not use the real existence of abuse to excuse away her behavior. Plenty of people are abused and don’t attack others in public like this.
You know us wimmins, empty vessels until filled up by the mens… /s 
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She should have been wearing a mask. She’d still be anonymous
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@wphurley and @RickMycroft The Florida Man (also a medical worker) in the 4th popular link in this thread got charged with Third-degree aggravated assault with intent to commit a felony for the exact same thing. Who knew Healthcare workers were so dangerous outside of there jobs. Thanks @SenorSchaffer!
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