#185) Guest post from a Covid widow

The following was emailed to me in response to this post. It was written by the widow of an unvaccinated man who, like “Travis” of the above mentioned post, died from Covid. She requested that her experiences and thoughts be shared.

Yeah, I wish he’d just taken the damn vaccine.

But it’s not quite that simple, at least I don’t think it is.

Deep down, yes, my husband was worried about the Coronavirus. But he was also worried about injecting himself with an unknown substance, one that at the best would probably have made him sick for a day or two and at worst might have killed him. Even more so, he feared the power of a government that would require him to inject himself with this unknown substance. In the early days of the pandemic, as celebrities told us to stay home from the comfort of their mansions and the mainstream media did everything they could to monger fear, divisiveness and hysteria, we watched many of our friends and neighbors lose their livelihoods because the powers that were didn’t consider them essential. Suddenly, government bureaucrats who have never had to face the challenges and worries that small business owners across America do every day were making decisions about who stayed open and who didn’t. THAT was what truly scared my husband, and when he saw the power that the government was wielding from leveraging vaccine mandates, it started all over again.

Yeah, I wish he’d just taken the damn vaccine, but it’s easy to look back in hindsight. When you’re in the heat of the moment, it’s hard not to get swept up. When everyone around you is taking up arms, it’s hard not to do the same. Did the people who, when they heard us being refused entrance to a restaurant because we didn’t have proof of vaccination, said, “The Klan meeting’s two doors down” think they were going to change our minds? What about the person who spit on a friend of ours who was holding a “Block the mandates” sign at a local rally? (The spitter, incidentally, spat out the passenger side window of a car that had a “Coexist” bumper sticker, but you didn’t hear that from me.)

In addition to strangers turning up their nose at us, we have been shunned by friends we’d known for years. Some have flat out told us we are not welcome; others have expressed surprise when we have reached out, as if because we had differing opinions about one issue, we had completely incompatible values altogether. In our experience, many people who complain about how the Oscars don’t have enough diversity refused to engage with us – or anyone else who had a differing opinion. We were judged for “not believing the science” of masks and vaccines by people who think that someone with a penis should be allowed to compete against girls.

My husband honestly never cared if other people got vaccinated or wore a mask. He never chewed anyone out for their views, rarely even brought up his own opinions without being asked and didn’t even complain about having to wear a mask or socially distance, even when the goalposts kept being moved and government agencies backpedaled when their findings were proven inaccurate. When the people who had ostracized him for not getting vaccinated had bad reactions to their jabs, or ended up getting Covid even after taking the booster (who knows, he may have gotten the virus from someone who was fully vaxxed), he didn’t rub it in. Out of the people who walked out on us, exactly one apologized and my husband welcomed that individual back with open arms.

The response to his death among our community was muted. I did get a few cursory condolences, as if they were acknowledging the death of a former co-worker’s grandparent’s veterinarian’s cousin, not someone with whom they had regularly been social until just recently. I feel grateful that there were no truly nasty comments, but is that what we want? To live in a world where animosity is so common that it seems like a blessing when people don’t tear apart someone who’s not alive to defend themselves?

Yeah, I wish he’d taken the vaccine, but I think we need to look at ourselves and ask how we got to this point. If someone who never told others what to do and only asked that he be allowed the same privacy can be vilified, it begs the question of who will become the next sacrificial lamb and how they will be punished when their opinions become unfashionable.

#184) How not to offend people #4: Penzey’s Spices

Fair is fair. After calling out people on the right such as Barry Presgraves and Bill Baptist for making comments that showed a gross miscalculation of risk to reward ratios, I’m going to put Bill Penzey, Jr. of Penzey’s Spices on the hot seat. Just as I can only shrug and accept that there are things I’ll never understand when I see people gamble their career on an Aunt Jemima joke, I have the same response to Penzey and his ill-considered “Republicans Are Racist Weekend” promotion. The Wisconsin-headquartered company, with 53 locations across the country, predictably faced a backlash with over 40,000 mailing list recipients unsubscribing.

Politics are nothing new to Penzey, who featured a gay couple on the cover of his company’s catalog in the early 2000s and created a blend called “Arizona Dreaming” in response to the ongoing battle over immigration policy. After the 2016 election, he wrote, “You really are a good bunch, but you just committed the biggest act of racism in American history since Wallace stood in the schoolhouse doorway 53 years ago.” Whatever the net result of these events may have been for Penzey’s bottom line, he must have been led to believe that “Republicans Are Racist Weekend” would be profitable.

While debasing one’s opponent isn’t exactly a new tactic, the left used to balance it out with positive messaging, or at least made more of an effort to keep up the appearance of doing so. No, not everyone bought into “hope and change” but at least was a starting point. Black Lives Matter and #metoo may have been repeated to the point of near self-parody, but both started with a clear goal of giving victims a voice. Crossing the aisle, even “Let’s Go Brandon” has managed to galvanize a voter bloc in a way that I’m guessing “Republicans are racist” probably won’t – and in Wisconsin, one of the most contentious battleground states, the Democrats need all the galvanization they can get. The 40,000 who unsubscribed from the Penzey’s mailing list represents double Biden’s margin of victory in America’s Dairyland. No, not all of the unsubscribers were Wisconsin residents and boycotting a business doesn’t equate to jumping ship from the political party with whom said business aligns. Still, Penzey mirrors a self-destructive tendency of the current Democratic party and left in general to point the finger at the other side instead of fixing their own problems. (I’d say that the Republicans are also self-destructive, but those who think the Capitol invasion was a good thing seem to be doing a lot better with their constituents than those who don’t.)

Penzey’s intentions may have been noble enough – “I want other businesses to look at what we’re doing. If you want customers to support your business, you have to support the values and lives of your customers.” He also points out, “The luxury of not being on a side is something of the past.” These are valid ideas; with some more thought, perhaps Penzey could have expressed them in a way that would have given pause to people on both sides. Penzey had time to come up with something better. This was not the type of “Taco Tuesday” outburst that cost sportswriter Terry Frei his job a few years back (latent racism building up to the point where, like someone who has had too many tacos, they just have to drop that log no matter the circumstances.) Penzey’s comments weren’t caught on a mic that he didn’t know was hot. The promotion was allegedly scheduled to tie-in with Martin Luther King Day, a known event that would have allowed the planning of something more creative than “Republicans are racist.” One is reminded of the Simpsons gag where writers of a comedy magazine have an all night-meeting to decide that their new spoof will be called “Everybody Hates Raymond.”

Perhaps “Republicans are racist” reflects Penzey’s response to current zeitgeist – only the shortest, bluntest, least ambiguous statements can get any traction in the age of TikTok. Just as Presgraves bypassed any debates about affirmative action, gerrymandering and stand your ground laws and went directly to Aunt Jemima, perhaps engagement and nuanced discourse were not Penzey’s goals; he just wanted to be heard above the noise. Indeed, he was heard, and in addition to the backlash, some have come out in his support. Still, even if Penzey ends up winning this battle, barring a change in tactics and message, the party behind the causes for which he has put his business on the line will likely lose the war.