Please don't call it karma
I know in the west we use karma as a synonym for poetic justice. But that's not this.
This virus is not punishing hubris. When some foolish governor of Mississippi, or the idiot lieutenant governor here in Texas, or some disease mocking knucklehead congressman from Florida falls sick after mocking the disease or telling his constituents we have to get back to work before the quarantine has flattened out the curve enough to keep our hospitals from breaking, there's no karmic balancing of the good and bad in the universe.
And the people who a fall sick cause of someone else's the scientific ignorance about quarantine protocols are not asking for it the way these reckless politicians and right-wing journalists are. It's random who you run into. It's random who an ill person coughs on. It's random who touches the wrong surface at the wrong grocery store. These things happen where people are most crowded, particularly in cities, and even rigorous efforts to limit contact will be imperfect.
It's not just that people who live in cities are more likely to be Democrats and thus more likely to be the early cases exposed to the coronavirus, it's also that fact that the concept of karma is that your actions have an impact on your future fortunes. That's not at all what happens with the coronavirus and covid-19.
Somebody's actions and words don't just endanger themselves. Being stupid about social distancing and hygiene protocols won't just get you sick. You get your parents sick, when they are the ones most at risk of dying. You get your neighbors sick, your grocery clerk, your gardener, people you ride in the elevator with at work, if you're foolish or vulnerable enough to have to go in. It's the Uber driver who comes to take you to the hospital, and it's the nurses and doctors who care for you while you recover. People misled by these reckless politicians and right-wing journalists will get them sick too... and might just kill them. The innocent, the unlucky, the essential, and the heroic.
Don't call it karma. It's not poetic justice. It's profound irresponsibility. It's disrupting or destroying innocent lives and making our country weaker. There's nothing balanced or cosmically corrective about spreading this disease.
= new reply since forum marked as read
