It was the first big psychic shift I had to take with the pandemic. There’s the era before where we could be idealistic about humanism and the era after where the material conditions have shifted and we need to adapt. Not adapting isn’t just not learning to use a computer when the information age dawned, but is actively killing everyone around them with the virus they either don’t believe in or refuse to understand. It’s as much social murder as the CDC commits when telling people not to mask. People who are fundamentally incapable of upholding some kind of social contract, who shit in the well we’re all forced to drink from, will never get better because the things compelling them to shit in the well are stronger than the condemnation of those who drink. They won’t be rationalised out of it because they’re driven by irrational things. They won’t stumble their way through the pandemic and emerge unscathed and without blood on their hands. If we ignore them we’re complicit, if we take their side for any stupid reason we’re no better, if we try to cuddle them out of their beliefs then it’s guilt through cowardice rather than malice. Without them unlearning their core beliefs they were damned the moment the pandemic began and without shunning them out of society the rest of us choose to be damned by them. If not by COVID, by the next one they’ll approach the same way. It’s a violent conflict they chose to start for nonsensical reasons so fuck them to death.