Another hellishly annoying thing I’ve seen liberals claim lately is that what’s occurred since the pandemic isn’t oppressive and psychologically traumatic, because we “have it good,” staying inside with our Xboxes, HBO Max, and Twitter. Never mind the vast job losses and economic dislocations, what’s happening is unprecedented in modern history and is taking a psychological toll on anyone who isn’t a daffy dipshit like the people making those claims are.

Here’s someone who said it better than I just managed to put it.

“Is this as bad as 1968?” is an utterly meaningless question precisely for this underlying reason. People do not invoke 1968 because of the objective similarities between 2020 and 1968. They do so because we have crossed a threshold at which basic foundations of social organization we take for granted now seem up for grabs. This is an inherently subjective determination, based on the circumstances of our present much as people in 1968 similarly judged the state of their worlds to be in flux. 1968 is an arbitrary signpost on an unfamiliar road we are driving down at breakneck speeds. You can blast “Gimme Shelter” on the car stereo for the aesthetic, but it’s not worth much more than that.

The trouble began with the virus. The virus – and the confused and incoherent response to it – shattered patterns of normal life and normal perceptions of agency. The virus is novel, but the collective shock it evokes is a common reaction under such circumstances. Subjective perception of space and time lose coherence and structure, a looming “sense of a foreshortened future” dominates, and the ability to imagine institutional realities as self-perpetuating diminishes. A symptom of this is the manner in which people suddenly find themselves addicted to enormous amounts of raw, unstructured, information. There is little context that would allow one to dismiss any particular datum, hence everything is mainlined from the content firehose.

Someone who actually understands what is going and its possible ramifications. Why is it so rare that someone can think credibly? I am constantly shocked by the utter naïveté of so many of my fellow liberals. They are worse than children, because at least children possess the perspicacity and clarity to notice when the world has shifted utterly and be distressed by the alteration; these mooks watch society crumble and tell us that we have it good because we can still play fucking Xbox.