This new bizarre insistence that we cannot criticize ("shaming") a choice to engage in unnecessary travel over the holidays in a pandemic because it will kill people feels like our own version of the right's worship of the Second Amendment, in a way.

There's a strong overlap in my mind between people who insist that we have to accept daily gun deaths as part of our freedom to own 57 guns per household and people who insist that we have to accept daily covid deaths as part of our freedom to travel to Mom's for Xmas.

& to be very clear, we absolutely need a government response to the pandemic because a systemic solution will always be better than offloading the issue onto individuals. But. BUT.

When a government has made it very clear that they refuse to act (and indeed are behaving as if they would very much *like* the people they govern to please die), then individual solutions are all we have left.

Criticizing the people who are calling on individual solutions in the absence of a government response, and who are doing so out of self-preservation so they don't die, seems particularly cruel at this point.

More so than any "shaming" of choices that will get people _killed_.

I'd laugh if I weren't crying because yeah. https://twitter.com/StorySlug/status/1336681291652141059

For years we've seen online spaces center the mental health of white people over asking them not to commit harm, by which I mean requests like "don't be racist" are met with "BUT MY MENTAL HEALTH" and this feels like a natural escalation.

Because now it's like "don't do unnecessary travel because of a virus that is disproportionately killing Black people and disabled people" and the pushback of "my mental health requires that I go to spin class / yoga / Mom's house EVEN IF it means killing people" is massive.

Your mental health can legitimately be in conflict with someone else's safety; it is possible that your mental health *does* require spin class in order to be optimum. But when the scales have "people's lives" on one hand and "mental health" on the other... lives take precedence.

Anyway, I hope everyone can please not engage in unnecessary travel for the holidays. Staying home (when you have the option to stay home) saves lives.