The 'Most Compassionate' are Indifferent to your Death

This pandemic has felt like one large social experiment, pushing people to act in a manner that I naively thought wouldn’t be possible. People I used to believe were reasonable now give unreasonable requests and the slogan of “we’re in this together” has been replaced with “comply or be left out”.

In the past, when our country experienced a tragedy, we would cling to our nationhood as a social commonality and together we marched forward past such dire straits. For example, post 9/11, Americans came together to heal after the unspeakable had just occurred. We mourned together, and we wanted revenge together. Today, we mourn separately and want revenge against each other.

It’s far easier for a country to come together post-tragedy if we have an outside actor that caused our pain. Osama Bin Laden became that villain that we unanimously disdained and with good reason. We held him almost singularly responsible for the attacks made on our soil and became war crazy because of it. This is not to state that our reaction to invading a foreign nation was the proper response, this is to state that even if our reaction was an overreaction, it was a bi-partisan reaction.