The overlap between people who are Very Serious About Stopping The Virus and people who clearly hate on a personal level anyone who has contracted the virus, regard it as their fault and wish death on them, is very large.

In America, anything can and must be a moral crusade.

I caught the virus despite wearing a mask constantly and limiting my movements to work, the grocery store, and home. When I caught it, I immediately isolated for two weeks. And now I have to lie about that, because catching a *pandemic disease* is now proof of being evil to many.

The approach from the start of this was always moralistic- don’t be selfish by wearing a mask, save them for health workers!- and now like most modern moral crusades, it’s dissolved into a simple way of making social judgements between the elect and the damned, deserving and not.

If you think about the implications for half a second, a lot of the very scientific, sober virus control plans this year begin to look like aristocratic generals sending conscript cannon fodder out to die, except we call them “public health officials” and “essential workers.”

And that is a very large part of why we can’t seem to get an aid package together: because lurking in the background is the idea that people only suffer in this crisis if they deserve to suffer, if their purpose is to suffer, and so we are content to let them do so alone.

Moralizing is not morality. Abstract self-serving theories of who deserves what in some cosmic sense do nothing or less for real human beings who are suffering right now. And yet we cannot escape the mode of thinking we can hurt and die our way out of this.

Utterly infuriating.