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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Possibly. I grew up as poor white trash and my high school friends largely reflect that, worked in a factory and my blue-collar friends (the two I keep in touch with) reflect that as well, and then uni to a bog-standard office career - so plenty of white-collar colleagues and a couple of friends as well. All that means I think my bubble is hopefully a little more diverse in opinion than that of most people. It could be in part that I'm Australian - the response was largely bipartisan because for quite a long time lockdowns meant 'no Covid' instead of 'we still have Covid but you also can't go out to eat'.

There are plenty of people I know who are still mad about the pandemic response, but it all seems to be vaccine-centered. Though the 'Australian' bubble is very difficult to pop, it's not as if I can go out and meet new Americans in real life on a regular basis.

It's also why I'm asking, though! Maybe my friends weren't representative and most everyone was fine and had moved on. Maybe everyone was mad about lockdowns and didn't care about vaccines. I certainly didn't know, so I thought it was worth raising.

Australia seems like a pretty big confounding factor, here, and I'll grant that popping that bubble is not particularly reasonable. In America it's quite common to run into people IRL who are extremely bitter about covid measures for one reason or other; particularly younger working class men, or skilled blue collar labor(for whom lockdowns meant, in practice, that they were required to go to work as before but could not leave the house for any other reason), or devoutly religious people(who interpreted church closings as persecution, especially post-Floyd). And that's without getting into the rural-urban divide.