The posts here show me that some in the American population do fully appreciate the extent of the threat COVID poses. I don't think we are being alarmists. We expect the threat to diminish eventually, but we foresee that we will continue to be threatened at some level way into the future. We see that states may be exacerbating the threat by ending precautions too soon. We know lots of our fellow citizens would like to believe what they want to believe. That's unsafe for everyone.

A lady at a grocery store got talking to me the other day. Her mask was around her neck. She said that "masks don't work." She further said that these COVID precautions are just an attempt to convert our nation into a "socialist" country. She didn't make a lot of sense. We started off talking about how Walmart is pushing it's own store brand and offering less name brand product on shelves. She said that was all part of turning our country "socialist."

Obviously, she has no idea what socialism is. Apparently, she equates any trend she doesn't like with socialism. I wish I had asked her where she gets her information from. She seemed to be parroting off stuff that had been fed to her. She seemed to have no capacity for thinking for herself. It reminded me of how the capital rioters sounded. There are an awful lot of Americans on that wavelength. We are really in a war against ignorance. I think we're losing this war. We're losing it in Texas. What's scarey to me is that my health is being threatened by other people's ignorance. And we have leaders - like the Texas governor - who want their constituents to be ignorant. You know, like telling them the power failure was due to "windmills freezing up." He darn sure knows better than that. I'm seeing where ignorance is one of the most dangerous things in the world. Furthermore, it's a hard thing to correct. It seems as though the ignorant like being ignorant. You can't tell anything to people who are willfully ignorant.

I guess there's 2 kinds of ignorance: There's innocent ignorance, which can be corrected with information. Then there's this willful ignorance of people who really don't want to know truth. They've invested so heavily in certain beliefs that they can't stand having those dumb ideas challenged.