What’s been obvious for some time now is that all the anti-vaxx, anti-mask hysteria is about something else. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime, or more specifically, the outrage doesn’t fit the amount of inconvenience. We’ve all had vaccinations in our lives. If you went to grade school or ever left the country for certain destinations, you got the requisite shots. Nobody went banana screaming bonkers about having to get a polio vaccination, you just did it. Likewise, if a shot was needed to cure some malady, say tonsillitis, you got the penicillin.
So what is behind the anti-vaxx, anti-mask hysteria? I have no idea other than to say that rebelling against these medical precautions somehow translates as taking a stand for core values and sacred personal liberties, to a certain varietal strain of lunatic in this country. Unfortunately, this strain of lunatic, like weeds, just keeps growing and growing and mutating faster than the coronavirus itself.
Here is the poster child for the lunatic strain of human weed. All this emotional violence and physical aggression over a little rectangle of cloth?
Meanwhile in MIA last night? | #ONLYinDADE pic.twitter.com/QFNogzDYzg
— ONLY in DADE (@ONLYinDADE) August 28, 2021
What do these fools think is going to happen? That if they just go wild, airport authorities will just say "ok fine. Now that you've shown how unhinged you are, you can board the plane, not wear a mask, and cough at will while the other passengers follow the rules?" Um, no.
— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid ? (@JoyAnnReid) August 28, 2021
We continue to stand firm with @MiamiDadePD in protecting the security/safety of all areas in the airport. @FAANews reported unruly behavior incidents are to more than 3,800 in ‘21. We don’t tolerate this behavior at MIA. Police responded & apprehended the passenger.
— Miami Int'l Airport (@iflymia) August 28, 2021
At least he got apprehended. I’m assuming he got put on the No Fly list? Boy, I sure wish some psychologist would do a paper on this. What is this displaced aggression? And even when it’s not aggressive, why do these people ignore their personal safety? I remember speaking to a homeless woman in L.A. last year. I asked her why she wasn’t wearing a mask and offered her one of mine. She said, “It burns my face.” I just ended the conversation there. Some people are too far out of it to be reasoned with. In her case, it was a little more understandable. The homeless population faces a set of challenges that the yous and mes cannot appreciate, and that’s a topic for another column.
This guy at the airport was in a different class altogether. Maybe it’s because he knew this was his fifteen minutes of fame? Or rather, infamy? Because this clip is going viral, but if he’s now got a police record and if he can’t fly again, it seems to me to be a bit of a steep price for some moments of being a counter culture hero.
On the other hand, who knows? Maybe he’ll be the next Mellisa Carone and be speaking at right-wing events all over the nation. Maybe he’ll be an honored guest on Newsmax. The anti-vaxx movement could end up acting as a cross between Candid Camera and American Idol. It could be the RWNJs chance to come out of obscurity, leave the trailer behind, and be known to their fellow nut jobs. That, and a $50,000 bond will get you out on bail. I hope his guy finds out that the destination was worth the price of passage.
I was surprised security wasn’t there immediately – and it went on for long enough that there should have been several security people there by the time the clip ends. This is a guy who has serious problems.
The dude he was threatening took a lot more shit than he should have had to take. And finally had enough. I for one think it’s hilarious that when “Mr. tough guy” took an actual swing his target easily blocked it and knocked this asshole right on his butt!. That’s a humiliation that will haunt him with his buddies back home.
Oh, my. Same comment as PJ above. That clip was weird. I don’t understand why a public health issue has become a “personal freedom” issue. And whatever other issues are driving that guy, don’t even want to contemplate.
These folks never learned, what sane folks learn, i.e. I am NOT the center of the universe. Evil Narcissm is certainly part of our culture. He’s not “counter culture”. Those folks were the Beats, the hippies, civil rights activists, & nonviolent activists of every persuasion. No Virginia, our psuedo religious, shallow, violence worshiping, tv culture, coupled with the erosion of public education, PRODUCED this racist buffoon. I thought the staff was very tolerant. He would have gotten a severe kick in the balls if he dared rush at me. Maybe jam his nose into his skull. Break his collarbone with my cell phone(easily done). Either way the camera would have to angle down as I stomped him on general principle. U know. As a deterrent.
Imagine that all of the hospitals within 100 miles or more are closed. Doors locked, no one there at all. That is essentially the situation in parts of Texas and Florida, and other areas of the county are not far from that same situation. In those parts of Texas and Florida, the hospitals, even the Emergency Rooms are full of Covid patients. Patients are filling up the halls, and waiting in ambulances and cars in the parking lots. Nurses are quitting, too burned out to keep working. And all of this could have been avoided if right-wing news outlets and governors had not made refusing to wearing masks and refusing to be vaccinated a political statement!
Covid does not care about politics, it infects anyone that it can. I can remember standing in line to get the polio vaccine so that I would be allowed to go to school. Now some people are whining about their kids having to wear a mask in school?!?! It is time to put a stop to this anti-vaxx/anti-mask BS! I will put this as clearly as I can. Your (non-existent) “right” to not wear a mask and to not get vaccinated ENDS WHERE MY RIGHT TO NOT BE INFECTED WITH A DEADLY DISEASE BEGINS!!!!!!!!!
BTW, I have had both of my shots of the Moderna vaccine, and if it is recommended, I will not hesitate to get a booster! And I wear a mask anytime that I go to the grocery store, or anywhere else.
I read one message where a hospital in Idaho was looking for a bed for a patient, and the nearest one they could find was in CT.
Get vaxxed, mask up, and stay well.
Really, WHERE was security while all this was going on? It’s not reassuring to the traveling public to know this sort of thing, or worse, can go on without immediate response from security officers. What if he’d had a gun? It just seems like ever since the nation spoke up about not wanting our police officers to shoot unarmed black men in the back, our police officers have too often been absent, unavailable, unseen. These days we can’t get them to show up when kids take over and block off Portland streets for hours doing their speed-racing, squirreling around thing. We can’t get anyone to show up when the Loud Bois take over a Salem city park for one of their armed ammo-sexual love fests. It seems if we don’t give over total control and permission for them to do whatever, they take their toys and go home. Rick Wilson was correct when he titled his book Everything Trump Touches Dies. He broke our country. The worst thing that ever happened to us wasn’t Pearl Harbor or 9/11. It was Vlad rigging the election that let tRump take over our country. It’s tRump’s fault that all these whiney little POS with their exaggerated sense of ‘rights’, their oppositional and defiant behaviors that they never outgrew, their bratty tantrums, all crawled out from under the rocks to invade the real world. Our only hope is they get themselves infected with Covid and die from it or one of the ‘cures’ they’re dosing themselves with. Bleach or horse wormer anyone?
Oh, I know this guy! Rather, I grew up with dozens like him in my childhood and still see them almost every day round hereabouts. Utter baby men who are accustomed to throwing bare a***d shit fits at the slightest provocation and the women and weaker men in their lives bowing down and kissing their a***s and apologizing the whole time then giving them exactly what they want. That’s what he expected to happen because dudes like him really can’t comprehend that there is a bigger world that doesn’t work like that. That he is not in fact the king of all he surveys like he feels like at home.