BRIDGET PHETASY: Lectures From Limousine Liberals. The same people who sat at home praising essential workers as heroes now repay them with exclusion and sneering condescension:
Apparently, it’s difficult to comprehend that the people who never stopped working while you were in your bubble, who bore the greatest risk throughout the whole pandemic, are making their own calculated decisions about getting a vaccine. As a society, we seem chronically unwilling to take their arguments and reservations into account (let alone scientific considerations like natural immunity—the vulnerable populations that suffered the most deaths also suffered the largest rates of infection. It’s not out of the question that many already had the virus).
The discourse in the media makes it sound like these criticisms are aimed at the right-wing anti-vaxxer population—and that might be true on a countrywide level—but the numbers tell the truest story about who will be most disproportionately affected by draconian mandates. In L.A. County, only 54% of the Black population and 62% of the “Latinx” population have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Despite all the resources the city ostensibly devotes to equity and inclusion, it’s clear that these minority populations will be most affected by the mandates. If Black lives matter to you so much, shouldn’t you care that Black people will be excluded from restaurants and movie theaters and nail salons?
From my perspective, this is state-sanctioned discrimination, and the righteous moralizing from the pajama class is the highest form of limousine liberal hypocrisy. Aiming uncharitable and derisive rhetoric at the very people you have been screaming should have a seat at the table is a tone-deaf disgrace. It seems like in Los Angeles County, the signs calling essential workers heroes really mean “if you do what we say.”
To be fair, that’s been the attitude in socialist California for at least the past two decades. But the attacks on essential workers, and the recent events of Arnold Schwarzenegger barking “Screw your freedom!” to the L.A Times smearing the first black candidate for the governorship as “the Black face of white supremacy” have only heightened the contradictions, to coin a phrase.