If it didn't happen to me, it can't be true

 Because it didn’t happen to me….

 It’s not true.

 

The only conclusion I can come to about people in Ireland (and elsewhere) who are still having house parties, refusing to wear masks, heading to the airport for a weekend in the sun – is that they’ll never believe it till they’re in intensive care with Covid themselves. And as we know, if they’re under 40, that’s a very small chance. 

 

But I somehow don’t think the great unmasked are doing risk analysis or cost-benefit modelling about their behaviour. The Washington Post ran a (long but interesting) opinion piece last week headlined “The March of the American Kook”. The author, David Roth, eventually, got down to describing the actions of a group of people who organised an anti-Covid protest that caused Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, being used for a vaccination centre, to shut down for an afternoon. According to Roth (defector.com), the social media post spreading the call to arms for this protest said: “This is a sharing information protest and march against everything COVID, Vaccine, PCR Tests, Lockdowns, Masks, Fauci, Gates, Newsom, China, digital tracking, etc.” 

 

(And by the way, I did check his link.)

 

What I really like – meaning roll eyes in despair – about this notification is the “etc” at the end. The protesters are against lockdowns, wearing masks, poor Dr Fauci, California governor Gavin Newsom, China, you name it, and when they ran out of the usual suspects it just went to “etcetera”.

 

If you were feeling light-hearted about it, it’s a reminder of protesters brandishing a placard saying “Down With this sort of thing” at demonstrations in recent years, inspired largely by Father Ted. But if you can’t see the humour any more, this stubborn anti-ism is more a manifestation of anti-social bitterness and resentment than genuine reasoned opposition.

 

A profile of the antis also came via an extremely interesting Pat Kenny interview with Aoife Gallagher of ISD Global (February 1). Gallagher has been researching far-right platforms online, and anti-everything groups on the major social networks, so can offer some explanation as to why people deny Covid or say it’s all a con. 

 

The Digital News Report 2020 for Ireland noted that 62 per cent of Irish people are concerned about truth or lies online. But what about the other 38 per cent? They don’t care? I know I’ll be returning to this topic in my weekly musings. Is truth an old-fashioned value? But what about harm?

 

To circle back to my intro, harm to others does not seem to concern the anti-everythings. If you singled out one of those protesters at Dodger Stadium, or corralled Frank and Una of Liveline fame (“everything is so cheap in the Canaries”) it’s an odds-on bet that nobody close to them has died of Covid-19, or been in intensive care struggling for every breath. It used to be known as the “I’m all right, Jack” attitude and is the opposite of Christian charity, or Muslim charity for that matter. I can see that outlook in the US as a mutant distillation of the free-enterprise, individualist capitalist system: your place in life depends on how good you are and how hard you work, so if you are poor you’re a failure and unworthy.

 

That’s the curious thing about the anti-everything brigade. So much of their animus against the “liberal elites” looks suspiciously like resentment and envy of people who have done well in life. David Roth describes it like this in The March of the American Kook, explaining that there is an overlap with the antis and Trump supporters (the notice quoted above also asked protesters not to wear their MAGA gear). He writes of “simple stubbornness and a uniquely curdled hedonism … The politics these people profess is not about helping anyone, lord knows, or really about any kind of ideological program at all. It is about an obsessive and even loving taxonomy of and fixation upon enemies and problems, and the way it works is through relentlessness, and through a refusal to ever stop performing weird arias of anger and umbrage.”

 

Very nicely put, David. But added to that is the not-me experience. I didn’t die of Covid so Covid is not real. I might have lost my job because of Covid, but that’s not because Covid is a threat, but because of the conspiracy of the Davos gang and the rich and well-educated. Grrr.

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