It was a regular old Sunday morning, which meant dialing in for my extended family’s Sunday brunch Zoom call, and something about the way his face was getting red told me Uncle Gary was about to turn a whole lot of people dying into some political stance.
I’d seen Gary’s Facebook tirades about how state governments were “juicing” their death tolls, as if families losing loved ones was somehow a deep state conspiracy. Anyways, the second Chuck Todd said “if it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press” in the background of Cousin Steve’s Zoom, Gary looked about ready to burst.
And lo, the floodgates burst with almighty cries of “you shouldn’t be watching that Socialist propaganda!” All of a sudden there was an endless barrage of “fake news media” and “Chinese bioterror,” with a dash of “they just want to keep the economy closed to tank the administration.” It was all a pretty big yikes moment.
After Steve mentioned that more Americans have died of COVID-19 than the entire Vietnam War, Uncle Gary doubled down, claiming the “Vietnam War wasn’t even that bad.” It was all pretty wild, especially when Gary asked why “the deaths are magically only scary in blue states?”
By the end of the call, Uncle Gary really lost the audience when he used the terms “a whole buncha dead people” and “phoney-baloney” in the same sentence.
