That’s ok @tobee: I’m sorry I’ve only words to offer.
Ye-es, there has indeed been an awful lot of “well the vulnerable can just stay inside forever and the rest of us can go on as normal”; with the SUPER fun bonus of “we locked down for you BE GRATEFUL”. Oh and screeds about how, given that, we are responsible for the economy crashing don’t mention the Brexit & future generations having no job prospects etc. Being part a millennial, I’ve not THAT much time for that pov, having watched the metaphorical ladders be hauled up all around me. WTAH we were doing telling everyone university was some kind of necessity &/or right; & making a degree a pre-requisite for so many careers... but I digress...
All the conflating shielders with the 70+ group was a disaster really. Mind you, the amount of people ready to shove healthy 70 year olds off this mortal coil really shocked me. 70 isn’t old any more. Admittedly, I’ve never really thought of it as old - WW2 so rudely getting in the way of what my grandparents’ might’ve expected from life in the 1940s meant that my maternal grandmother was 70 before I was born & my paternal grandparents turned 70 before I did 10. (My maternal grandfather would’ve been 85 had he lived to see me born...) But none of them, even with my maternal grandmother having had open heart surgery, seemed “old”; and all were boundingly fit until, in my maternal grandmother’s case, my mother died a couple of years before her; my grandfather developed heart failure a year before he died (still fitter than most men in their nineties); & the literal day she died in the case of my other granny. Fitter, frankly, than plenty of the people chuntering on about people who’ve “lived their time”. Willing to bet they might feel otherwise were the shoe on the other foot. This myth people are desperate to swan-dive into the great beyond, or at the very least Don’t Mind is really alarming. Even the people who say they’re Ready To Die generally mean in the sense they’ve no unfinished business, not they’re actively hoping for death. There are - sadly - people of all ages for whom death is an end to suffering nobody should have to endure. One of my father’s cousins died the day before my birthday after being ill for several years in just such a way - she was 65, so not even the magical age at which apparently people are meant to be fine with withdrawing from the world in a fashion so dramatic even closed religious orders think it’s a bit hardcore &/or actual literal martyrdom. (As a side note, if I catch this sodding thing & die, I fully expect you all to start claiming I’ve caused Miraculous Events. There’s no Saint with my real name & I feel I’d make an excellent addition to the litany. Would also provide the ultimate moral high-ground...)
Somehow I’m still finding myself surprised by the threads on here about is it ok for me to flagrantly break the rules [in insert way here] - usually with the justification that they’ve “had a difficult time” &/or it would “help [their] mental health”. As if the rest of the world has been living it up through 2020; & as if “mental health” is a Get Out Of Jail Free card. Kleptomaniacs would doubtless be helped by having the freedom to shoplift with impunity, should we accommodate that? Change things up & admit people with EUPD/BPD to hospital long-term because they feel it would be helpful? (Would actually like to see much less stigma attached to the diagnosis & people with it not ignored when they are in acute settings so they don’t manage to do things like set themselves on fire & cause massive lasting trauma, but again, side issue.) People with anorexia think that if they can just lose “enough” weight they’ll feel great & frequently do experience periods of euphoria & manic energy; & people who self-harm often report that that makes them feel better. People drink excessively, take drugs & overeat to cheer themselves up & we don’t, as a rule, tell them to just crack on with it. I suppose that it’s a shared-behaviours thing, isn’t it... the justification by others are doing it/everyone does it/it’s not really harmful/it’s only once. And people will leap in to defend a behaviour they share that’s well-advertised as being harmful because they don’t want to believe it’s true. They particularly don’t want to believe negative things about themselves eg that their behaviour is selfish &/or puts others at risk - so if it can be normalised...
Ugh. Humans are terrible at a species level, basically. Literally the worst thing to happen to this planet. On an individual level, frequently awesome. Some of my favourite people are people. But taken as a whole, we’re a disaster, really.