I find it difficult to care about the fate of the stupid racist white people protesting the stay-at-home orders issued by various governors nationwide to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
It’s not a statement rooted in callousness. I don’t want them to die. It’s not like I’m planning to dance on their graves to Earth, Wind, & Fire in jubilee. But, if these people want to play the role of fools in this God awful parable we appear to be living in, so be it.
More than anything, I am just so sick of the media’s obsession with them. Do we really need to obsess over these folks even in some of their dumb-dumb deaths?
Paul Krugman wants to believe that finally – finally, finally, finally – the Trumpists are going to embrace sanity. He is not alone. There are headlines from The Guardian like “Debacle of Trump’s coronavirus disinfectant comments could be tipping point.”
Krugman knows far more than me about economics, but I am quite adept at squashing white naïveté. Believe me when I say this comes from love: I need you people making that type of money to stop writing so damn goofy. And wash your hands, naturally.
We already know this story. These are the same Tea Party clowns that far too many white anchors, pundits, columnists, and reporters posited as small-government advocates gone made when they were nothing more than pawns. Before that, they were chasing behind Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and other racists presumably also named Pat. They are the people whose prejudices are exploited by the rich for pennies on the dollar.
Whatever they’re hollering about – in this case, the right to go outside without a care in the world and die – is never really the issue. It’s always somehow really about the other — who often looks like the person writing this essay and the key demo reading it. So, it should not be lost on anyone that around the same time these protests started happening, it came on the heels that Black people were disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus than them.
Once many of them figured out it was majorly Black people dying from coronavirus, they trivialized the virus even more. I may not be able to muster much in sympathy for someone dumb enough to let Donald Trump lead them to death, but there is something quite pitiful about how many are going to die over their obsession with willful ignorance. Still, shouldn’t we focus more on those who want to live?
A lot of them are going to die, and if Donald Trump’s political fortunes perish later this year with them – an outcome of widening plausibility – they will take their white hoods, Tiki torches, and Confederate flags to another bigot. Maybe Josh Hawley? Perhaps Tom Cotton. God help us, it could be Donald Trump Jr.
Until then, oh well. They’re not that important, and they never have been. It’s not that many of them out there protesting. Polls have shown people believe in the stay at home orders. But if that is the case, why so much focus on these dumb white folks?
Aren’t conservatives big on the free market and personal responsibility? Well, now that we have head about their decisions, let us depart from their narrative, spray ourselves with Lysol, and go back to focusing on the people who actually want to live.
The continued fixation on stupid yokel white folk in the Trump cult comes at the expense of the Black people, queer and trans folk, homeless folk. The same can even be said of the white people who don’t vote or tweet like Roseanne Barr. Those dumb racist white people will fail in thwarting the stay at home orders, but if the media doesn’t collectively stop giving them a disproportionate amount of attention, they win.
The point is always to devalue Black life and it would be nice that for once, mainstream media actively did its part to not help assist the racists in such endeavors.