Sometimes, Everyone Needs A Helping Hand.
Pony Cable is helping.
As the “mask mandate” returns to Los Angeles County, I’m finding myself thinking more and more about the point of it. Most people that I encounter still seem to think of it as protection for themselves, as opposed to what it really is, which is protection for other people.
In California, only a tiny majority…51.5% of the population of the state is fully vaccinated. In Los Angeles County, the number is higher at 69.4%, but that still means that as of this writing, almost a third of the people that I encounter are not protected from a lethal disease.
More importantly, 100% of the new cases and hospitalizations are from people that have not been vaccinated.
Those are some rough numbers to swallow, to internalize in a credible sense. It’s easy to say, “those people had every opportunity to get the vaccine, but they decided not to, so what happens, happens.” It’s easy, and I’ve heard people say it. No lie, when I see some crazy supporter of the former President talking trash about vaccinations, I often think it.
That’s not the whole story though. There are plenty of people who are already health compromised in some way, and can’t just “go get vaccinated.” Some of those people would actually want to, so they could stop living in some kind of fear or isolation. They exist, and are real. They certainly don’t deserve our scorn.
Even a lot of the “vaccine skeptics” have to be though about here. Plenty of those people just aren’t being smart, or maybe aren’t smart enough to actually understand the situation. They have excuses, and “facts” that they point to, but they have been sold a bill of goods by the internet, or sham authorities. We would feel sympathy for someone who had been misled by a scam artist because they weren’t smart enough to see the scam, so we kind of need to feel sympathy for these people as well.
Meaning, as inconvenient as it is for US, we have to mask up to protect THEM. From a deadly virus, and themselves.
It’s the right thing to do.
Superhero comics are often about beating up the Bad Guy, an adolescent power fantasy that feels narratively satisfying. That’s all fine, but many of the comics that I love are also about doing the right thing, even when the right thing is sometimes unsatisfying. Even when it puts you at a disadvantage.
Today’s sketch was all about that. Cap can’t just pick up a beached whale and put it back in the water. It would hurt the whale. It’s just too big and heavy to not be injured by a human sized super person picking it up in some way. To really help, you need to go get that big ol’ superhammock (I was imagining it as a kind of construction tarp) and do things as gently as possible. You see, that’s helping.
Pony Cable can be (and obviously is) a bit sore about it. That’s also part of the metaphor here. Sometimes, when you help people who have kind of made their own problems, you can be a bit sore about it. That doesn’t mean that you should not help, or be a jerk, it just means that you get to have feelings too.
Yes, it is going to suck when people are jerks about wearing masks again. Yes, I’m going to be mad about it. And yes…if everyone had done what we were supposed to do, we’d be fine, and medically vulnerable people wouldn’t be at risk.
All those things are true.
At the end of the day, we have no control over those things. We can only perform our own actions, and decide if they are right or not. We can help the beached whale, which is helpless, or just walk away.
Tales of Adequacy! 