And Around We Go

...the more they stay the same.

So here we go again with the why are they like thats and the who in the actual f*ck behaves that way and thinks it's right and the I just don't get its.

And it's with everything, from the ridiculous to the sublime, with serious and frivolous in between. I have questions here, people, and I'm really tired.

Just tired.

Tired of playing the good guy when the bad guys get away with everything.

I work for a school district, and some of the things I hear from parents or community members or even some of my colleagues are completely nonsensical.

People saying our department is crap to work for because they encourage workers to come in sick... and yeah, like most of the rest of the planet, that was pre-pandemic. Since you took a leave of absence for the entirety of the building closures, how would you know? Is it just sour grapes? Misery loves company, maybe?

Folks who claim to know "the real story" behind the pandemic - yeah, sorry, vitamin C ain't gonna cure it, 5G doesn't spread it, and vaccines are actually a good thing. Think of it this way: even in the capitalistic patriarchy in which we live, the drug companies want to keep us alive so we can buy more of their crap, right?

Candidates for school board who didn't like the way the board or the superintendent handled our pandemic closures and who outright lie about the stats (like "our super is paid more than everyone else's" while making sure they compare her complete package with health care and all to the other supers' base salary), and who do not have any experience with anything like a school board. They don't have kids in public school in our district, current or past. Or they compare the local private school with 2000 students in four buildings to our district of 22,000 over a few dozen buildings... and don't see anything wrong with that. Or complain about sex education as though we're forcing kindergartners to watch pornography - in the younger grades, sex ed is "you have the right to tell people not to touch you" - or critical race theory, even though they can't define it.

Those are the big ones, of course, and naturally these are the same sort of people - or there's a lot of overlap in the Venn Diagram - who "don't believe" in the sheer existence of LGBTQIA+ people, think the pandemic and climate change are massive hoaxes, and believe that the January 6th mob at the U.S. Capitol were peaceful protests.

Naturally, actual peaceful protests that devolved into something else after bad actors showed up to loot and to make the peaceful protestors look bad don't get the same leeway. They "should have complied" or maybe your business is just more important than other people's lives.

Which is, naturally, the same issue with opening up venues and schools and whatnot. We could have been in a much better place if more people had just followed the rules in the beginning. Isolate, mask, vaccinate when available. But no, we have to be all rugged individualists and bootstrapping (except the actual rich people, who can insulate themselves from all that).

And no matter how much data we show, or how many "unvaccinated anti-vaxxer dies of covid" stories we print, some people still believe that it can't happen to them. I guess that's it; because of their strong American values or their religion or whatever, they think they're immune. And it's already obvious that they don't care about anyone else, no matter how much lip service is paid to "think of the children" memes.

It's exhausting; the rest of us are scrambling to cover the missed bits, and defending ourselves and others from ridiculous accusations of everything from kiddie porn to conspiring with alien overlords.