I’ve been done since March 20th with shaming individual people for decisions that should have been handled by the institutions we task with such things. Mad at kids partying in a club?

Live from Stillwater, Oklahoma tonight ladies and gentleman.

This is how #OkState students are complying to off campus social distancing guidelines. pic.twitter.com/zKQu1PyMP1

— Ryan Novozinsky (@ryannovo62) August 16, 2020

That’s not on “college students,” who make terrible decisions, news at 11. It’s on the city, county and state, and the presumed adults who own and operate that club, to shut that shit down.

We keep acting like people aren’t people. The entire reason to have laws and regulations is because people are idiot assholes, and not just when they’re 19. I am a grown-ass woman who’s old enough to be embarrassing to her teenage nieces if she goes out dancing but I swear sometimes I feel like eff it, no one else is doing shit, why am I staying home?

You put out a tray of shots, I am taking one. SO STOP MAKING BUTTERY NIPPLES BY THE PITCHER, FER CHRISSAKES.

(This is a cousin to the news stories every year about stampedes for a waffle iron at Walmart on Black Friday. Everybody laughs at the poor people tripping over each other and nobody asks why the store encourages that shit.)

Periodically throughout this crisis we’ve heard about how we’re not united in our response to it, nor collectively experiencing it the way we have other major crises, and then told it’s all our fault: 

Still, focusing solely on Washington’s response to the pandemic would be letting the American public broadly off the hook, McElya said.

“We need to really consider this and talk about this as a collective national failure,” she said. “One certainly encouraged by our leadership. But people have to submit or commit to that narrative, and so many have, and that’s an enormous sadness.”

Look. I am not excusing people who’ve picked up on the anti-mask thing as one more way to be a belligerent dickhead to the sandwich girl, but someone sold them that line. A lot of someones, on a network that starts with F and ends with X and in the middle is an endless stream of grievances and resentments and fears. I don’t think you can let off the hook the people profiting from chaos and confusion.

Yelling at your neighbors on Facebook is where Republicans WANT you right now. They want you demoralized by the everyday stupidity of individuals instead of the rapacious greed of leadership. They want you to yell at me and me at you. Why? Because then we’re not yelling at them.

Christ, my neighborhood corona-info group had to BAN posts that were like I WAS OUT WALKING TODAY AND THERE WAS A PERSON NOT WEARING A MASK RIGHT because that’s all it was after a while, not the kinds of breakdowns of information that would actually inform anyone.

If we’re not focused as a nation on something, if we’re not facing something collectively, it’s not because young white people went to the bars and it’s not because somebody wasn’t wearing a mask in a public park. It’s because our president insisted we open the bars. It’s because the GOP’s propaganda network told people masks were tyranny.

Stop wishing for unity and then deploring your neighbors for the actions of your leaders. We don’t have time for this.

A.