I’ve got a friend who’s not taking any Covid precautions because he’s angry about restrictions placed on people at the beginning of the pandemic. He wants to forget it ever happened. I mentioned Covid can infect dogs. He loves his dog. He paused & said “well what can I do?”
I felt a moment of hope because it seemed like the risk to his dog MIGHT be the thing that got through to him. I shared a few articles about Covid in dogs and he was horrified and genuinely worried for his pup. He wanted to know how to protect her.
We discussed HEPA filters & ventilation, testing & masking around your pet if you have Covid. I explained how a layered approach is the most effective. His reply? “That really sucks. I don’t want anything to happen to my dog. But that’s way too much work.”
This person doesn’t care about their own health or the health of those around them - but they DO care about their dog. Yet getting a HEPA & masking when ill was considered “too much” to prevent something they described as horrific. I don’t get it. How do we get people to care?
Also if you’re not aware of the risk of Covid in dogs (and all animals) I highly recommend researching it and doing whatever you can to protect them from infection. They are completely vulnerable and need their humans to do the right thing.
@furqanshah it’s ok - sadly you’re right. I try very hard to approach people who aren’t taking covid seriously with compassion - but many are making it very hard. They all seem to believe they will be the exception despite there being nothing to support that belief.
There IS something that supports that belief. It's the whole societal edifice of ableism
It's the history of protestantism, going back to what, the 1500s? The doctrine that if you get sick or become disabled (or your dog does) it's because God is judging you, and you are a bad person
Everyone says, well I'm a good person so it's not going to happen to me
Combine that with a society where the disabled (who are now the majority in the US) are so segregated that they are seem to be extremely rare. He doesn't see very many disabled people in the street, in the coffee shop, at his job... So it seems like something that hardly ever happens
As @Kjl said yesterday, the people (and pets) with bad covid outcomes are all either dead or stuck in their houses, so if you look around in public, it seems like everyone is 'back to normal'
@NilaJones@broadwaybabyto@furqanshah@Kjl It feels impossible, doesn't it? You feel like maybe someone is open to at least thinking about taking covid precautions, and then.... Most of the time I don't even bother sharing studies anymore, but if I do, it's usually only one before I burn out. And on the RARE occasion when someone asks "What can I do?" I'll say something like "Well, you can start with..." (whatever I think is the one thing they are most likely to try, like maybe masking around his pet if he feels like he's sick). But I'm obviously not having a very high rate of success with this approach, so I'm probably not doing it any "better" than anyone else.
But I will say re: the history of protestantism that there are definitely subsets of doctrine, some of which are ableist in differing ways, and some of which are quite egalitarian in their belief that everybody deserves judgement, but in a more broad sense. Those folks may not attribute any one particular sickness to God's targeted individual judgement. But then things can really get weird if they see either someone who they really think is a genuinely good person get sick. I saw that when my mom (preacher's wife) got terminal cancer. People within the church generally had one of two reactions. 1) Oh, you just don't have enough faith and aren't praying hard enough for healing, so it's your fault that you aren't getting well. Or 2) ...Crickets. They genuinely don't know what to say or think. They just can't understand how something so contrary to the way they think things work could happen. The amazing few tackle this shift in worldview and really come out the other side with a much deeper sense of who God really is (and it's much bigger than anything that will fit in their neat little box). But most just find a way to blame God for their flawed doctrine. Until it happens to them of course....
All the victim-blaming started making a lot more sense when I read about the Just World Hypothesis and I realized why people are so desperate to believe that everyone deserves their suffering.
Like co-signed, underlined, highlighter, presented with a chorus line. This is it right here.
Their entire belief system HINGES on the fact that if they can do everything right, then Sky Daddy will love them and nothing bad will happen to them. They have to believe that folks deserve the bad things or their entire belief system collapses around them.
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