This article saying the "abstinence only" approach to curbing the pandemic is failing keeps cropping up on my sidebar. Of course it is. AUSTERITY ALWAYS FAILS.

My little sister is PANICKING because she's a hair stylist, she's very good at her job, but if she doesn't do hair, she doesn't eat, and I have already given her the maximum amount of money I'm allowed to for the year.

Yeah, it's December, but her power bill isn't going to wait for January to get paid. Or her grocery bill. Her vet bill. All the other bills the world presents. She's in the SF Bay Area, where a shutdown is looming, and she's still doing hair.

Over the course of this pandemic, she's gone from cautious and following every rule to going back to work to only masking about half the time, because she CANNOT allow it to be as bad as it is. She CAN'T.

If she accepts reality, and has to go to work anyway, she's going to SHATTER. Because the money is there. She knows the money is there. She knows people increased their pledges to my Patreon to pay her bills.

And I can't give her the money, because if I give her any more money, we go over the IRS giving limit and she owes taxes on everything I've given her--my sister, my BABY SISTER--in 2020.

If the government had provided relief, she'd be happy to abstain. To stay home and accept reality and be safe. But instead, the government has said her life is worth nothing, and so she has to be unsafe, and so she's doing what she has to in order not to be too scared to work.

Am I happy about it? No. I can barely talk to her, because she starts parroting COVID denier talking points, and even as I recognize the coping mechanism, I love her and want her to live and want her to not hurt anyone else.

But I can understand.

More relief, or at least an increase in how much money can be given before taxes would have made this so much easier on all of us. Abstinence could have worked, if we'd bothered to give it a scaffolding to stand on.