Masks?

[Vas Deferens]

(08-25-2021, 06:44 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Even your own article ends with "roughly 62 percent of all adults are fully vaccinated as of writing". So essentially 2/3rds are already vaccinated and the number is growing. Over 6 million more vaccines were given just last week in the US. Always remind yourself that 1. There's ALWAYS going to be bad people in any group of humans large enough. and that 2. They're in the minority.

It seems like that article went out of it's way to skim the internet for the worst examples of people in the country to try to bolster it's opinion that people being awful is the norm. I don't agree. I live in a fairly red, semi-rural area and I honestly wasn't given shit for wearing a mask a single time. There was the occasional jackass walking around in the grocery store without one, but it was honestly rare. Even now there's still people willingly wearing mask out and about (or maybe they're unvaxxed? Don't know) but I haven't seen any of them be accosted for it yet. The chinese/thai/japanese takeouts around here aren't struggling and seem to be doing pretty good business any time I go there. I was at the VA recently and an elderly gentleman dropped his paperwork. The very first person stopped their conversation with someone and helped him pick up everything without a single hesitation (before I could get there). People here still hold the door for others and thank others when it's done for them. Someone recently let me go ahead of them in line at a grocery store because I only had 2 items and they had a full cart. It honestly doesn't feel significantly worse. I don't know if my positive experiences outweigh their negative experiences, but theirs seems to be built upon scanning the internet and twitter feeds while mine is from interacting with other people.

What I think the disconnect is between my experience and the writer of that article? I don't use Facebook at all, I try to limit lurking on Twitter to only sports news, and I also try to not scan news articles online more than twice a day and anything I find outrageous sounding I go out of my way to find another distinctly different source. Enough news to keep me informed about events going on. I had friends who went full deep into diving into COVID articles in 2020. Reading pretty much every single one, and it had an actual effect on their mental health and happiness. They had to make a conscious decision to limit themselves to a more reasonable amount of news and it helped them.

I am admittedly mostly an optimistic person about humanity in general, but I always remind myself that there are always going to be shitty people in any group of humans large enough. That's just the fact of humans being individuals. The internet just gives them a place to gather and amplify their minority message/opinion. I think everyone would be happier if they cut back their social media and news consumption a bit and actually went an interacted with normal average people (though admittedly harder to do in a pandemic).

Thank you for reading and I genuinely appreciate your perspective here.  I can 100% appreciate where you're coming from and agree on many levels.  I do not use FB either, but I admittedly do digest a lot of news daily and would not describe myself as optimistic about humanity.  That's probably the biggest disconnect on this topic.

Again, thanks for the response.