You need to share that "over there", where someone was crying they were denied grieving, and trying the 'sob story' card.
No one's denying you the ability the grieve. You are just being asked to grieve in smaller numbers, or do it with social distancing via the internet or whatever. Demanding that tradition that has been followed for years during a pandemic has to be stritcly followed, is pretending there is no pandemic. You mean to tell me over the course of hundreds of years, a group of people didn't learn to adapt & make adjustments in difficult times? That sounds like no group of humans I've ever heard of. Made sadly more ironic if that tradition of grieving really is for people lost to the pandemic. It's basically creating a cycle for more grieving.
To me putting up concerns over "First Amendment rights" --as a fig leaf on political conflict over appropriate behavior during a pandemic-- comes down to the worst of American libertarian impulses. I'm at least as up for individual rights as the next American, but the way too many people buy into politicization of an undeniable public health crisis still shocks me, and I don't understand why more "conservatives" don't speak out about it.
The virus does not respect politics, so surely plenty of conservative leaning individuals have experienced covid-19 and could speak to the need to help tamp down the ease with which the virus spreads until vaccination takes an axe to the availability of new hosts.
Somehow I don't think the silence is from lack of media trying to find more conservatives to speak to this issue. Hopefully as the Biden transition takes hold in Washington DC, that may change. "Everybody loves a winner" or at least temporarily curries official favor to get a leg up during the changing of the guard at the White House, eh?
But it seems right now almost a knee-jerk reflex for too many of the right-leaning among us to disrespect requests or mandates to observe social distancing, to wear masks in public, to try to minimize attendance at gatherings unless required for work (medical caregivers, utility workers, grocery workers, transport operators, first responders etc).
OK, it's tribal. Tribal politics. But a glance back at history doesn't support tribal stupidity on this scale. Ancient tribes of hunter gatherers did not stand around watching tribesmen walk into quicksand one after another until no one was left on firm ground. Someone, a leader, said "Stop! This isn't working for us."
But we've gotten mixed messages about what to stop. Trump says covid is no big deal even now in the face of 250k and counting American deaths. Fauci says uh, it's not nothing, it requires a vaccine and cooperation in minimizing spread until we get one and get it distributed. Covid-19 says watch me go, baby.
Are we watching? Spikes now are everywhere across the country with more expected as a result of people believing they are exceptional in either their good luck or their need to be with people on the holiday despite entreaties from caregivers to stay home and save lives.
So much ongoing disregard for the unavoidable facts of our coexistence right now is disheartening. There can be a place and time for a lot of things but exercising rights without responsibility is almost always an antisocial, selfish and at least amoral if not immoral option. Can't think of another more compelling example than how the Republican "party line" on the coronavirus has been established... from the top down. Can't wait until the guy at the top is no longer the selfish ignoramus Donald Trump.
