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To be sure, a number of the fatalities I noted were friends of close friends or friends of close relatives. And my wife has a huge family (Catholic Filipina), but none of the losses were in the immediate family. A couple in Philippines might not have happened in the US. Unlike some here, in the last several years I’ve been “in the room” with close relatives this far || from the reaper (flu caused pneumonia, Dad, and a brother, and aspiration-ulcer caused pneumonia, Dad), and have a pretty good idea what extraordinary lengths our doctors and health care workers will go to, and the means they have, to save someone who has any chance. (Yes, both my Dad and my brother were on ventilators — they’d have not survived an hour or 2 without.) Anyway, while all those COVID fatalities were grievous of course, the impact to me was not that of, say, when my Mom passed. (Not COVID) Probably the one (Covid fatality) that bothered me the most was my best friend’s Dad — sort of a role model for me — passing: It was very hard on my friend’s family as that was early in the pandemic and they were not able to see him (as my friend’s Dad was in a nursing home and there was NO visiting.) 2nd worst might have been the 2 doctors, a husband-wife couple who lived not even 200 ft. from my wife’s cousin who’d raised her (my wife) and who (cousin) also helped out a lot with my Mom and to this day video chats with my wife almost daily. The couple were terrific people who did a lot of extra work in their community — a great loss, even if it was mostly to people I don’t know.

To address your point, though, obviously FR is as “political” as it gets, and the government choosing mandates and compulsion over effective, competent education, particularly in such a “personal” area, has made many already properly suspicious of gov’t into outright enemies — not of the country, but of the political order.

I’ve not run into any blocking of my posts, but I do realize that playing it with as little bias as I can is not popular with most posters around here. (My background and work requires quite a lot in the way of NOT allowing subjective biases, even subtle, to creep into my observations — in a way I’ve had nearly 50 years of training for this.)

I think it is also important to ask lots of questions - REAL questions, not just rhetorical questions. One can discern quite a bit about posters when they rarely ask genuine questions...

OT: I figure I’ll be lucky to go to my grave having learned 1/10th of what I would have liked (even including stuff forgotten along the way!). But, then I probably never had over 1/20th the capacity to absorb it all anyway.

(From Babylon 5 — memory / paraphrasal)

Sheridan (just B4 passing, wistfully): There is still so much I don’t understand...

Lorien (reassuring): As it should be.