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Notes -
The Trunk Test (Or What A Stranger On The Street Made Me Wonder About Politics):
I was walking out of work today (which is not in a place known to be at all friendly) and a man leaned out of a car I was passing and asked me to help him close his trunk. I was in a public area and the guy looked old and frail and harmless, which seemed like good grounds for this to not result in my murder and grounds for him to need assistance, so I did so.
As I did so I noticed that he was wearing a MAGA hat, it made me chuckle since I was in my literal blue tribe uniform (scrubs) and I figured that most of my coworkers would not help the guy as soon as they saw the MAGA hat.
It made me wonder.
Every so often I try to assess myself for frustration and burn out and determine if I've become an asshole and I was pretty certain that I would help someone in BLM gear as much as someone in MAGA.
My MAGA friends? Would either help neither or both, and this guy clearly felt someone visibly identified as his adversary would provide assistance (or perhaps hasn't realized how bad medicine is).
My Woke friends though? A lot of them would actively not help someone in MAGA gear or would respond with verbal abuse.
The thought is rather depressing and black pilling.
So I ask some questions-
Do you agree with my characterizations, are the people you have access to like this? Or better, or worse?
Does this say something about American politics? Was it always like this? Is this a sign of other sicknesses in society?
My ramble is poor anecdote, any data on this?
I wouldn't be so sure here. There are always going to be people like Georges Picquart, who stick their necks out for someone who comes from a group they don't particularly like because it is the right thing to do.
Maybe I am naive, but I think that if you were in an area with heavy winters, most people would stop to help a person of the opposite political tribe whose car had gotten stuck in the snow.
Context might matter though. My guess would be that the higher the stakes, the more likely cross-tribe cooperation becomes. Like, in the aftermath of a hurricane, I expect cooperation to be quite high overall, but if someone is just struggling to move unwieldly furniture, I could see more cases of people just letting a member of the other tribe just struggle. Maybe I'm wrong, though.
I mean it's not speculation, I've seen people provide worse care to people wearing MAGA gear
That's unfortunate. Is there any way for you to file a formal complaint? If you work in a medical setting, surely it isn't expected that people will give worse medical care to their political rivals?
Thankfully it's pretty mild but that also makes it harder to suss out.
A deficiency in empathy or a refusal to "waste time" on vaccine adherence counseling are both meaningful and unprofessional and very real and at the same time kinda small potatoes.
Is non-COVID Vaccine refusal now Right Wing coded? Just out of curiosity since I feel like most of the non-COVID antivaxxers I know are still more Hippy leaning.
Yeah it's completely swapped, to the point where a lot of people in healthcare will refuse to acknowledge the idea that it was ever left coded at all (in my experience previously it was the hippies and skeptical inner city Blacks, now those populations have been overshadowed by very loud and paranoid right wingers).
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