Remember how there was an episode of MASH where they were trying to keep a mortally wounded soldier alive through Christmas so they could record his death as happening on December 26th so Christmas wouldn't be "the day Daddy died" for the rest of his kids' lives?

At the end, they fail, but then Hawkeye moves the hands on the clock half an hour ahead and everybody agrees to falsify the record so that he died at 5 after midnight, the day after Christmas.

I'm pretty sure this is a trope that's shown up in other shows, delaying death or the delivery of bad news in order to not just not ruin *this* Christmas but to avoid staining it forever with death.

And, you know, I'd say it's kind of doubtful how much difference it would ultimately make in terms of the anniversary effect and the family associating Christmas with what happened...

...except my own mother managed to hang on through my entire birthday to die the next day, and if you've followed me the past year and change you *know* her death messed me up, but I have to say when my birthday came around again, I did feel better about it than I'd expected.

Anyway, I bring this up now because the right-wing talking point is that covid is an "excuse" for "the far left" to cancel holidays supposedly temporarily but secretly forever, and my point of view is, we're the ones trying to save them.

There are people celebrating Thanksgiving this year who will never celebrate it again because they're going to die... and then there are people who will never celebrate it again because they'll be traumatized by it.

If you code anyone who wants to scale back the holidays and cancel in-person gatherings this year as "the radical far left", then it's "the radical far left" who are trying to stop Thanksgiving and Christmas from being days of mourning and despair for the rest of our lifetimes.

We're not doing this to try to destroy families and end holidays, but to preserve them. You can try to pretend to have a "normal" holiday season this year... but you're likely to pay the cost of never having a normal, happy one again.

Or you can wait.

The right is trying to ostentatiously code their arrogant obliviousness as a sign of toughness and strength (see Ted Cruz's "Come and Take It" post, for example), but it's weakness. It's giving in. It's lacking the fundamental grit needed to exercise patience and care.