This needs an ableism tag.
It’s truly amazing how right-wingers like to volunteer others to die. They shame others for not working super dangerous jobs and pretend people who had to work those jobs long ago would choose that over something easier.
Over the centuries, countless people in the US and abroad have done plenty of very hard work to sustain themselves and their families. In order to do so, they needed to internalize some risk and bring some toughness to bear.
For example, my grandfather and countless others of his generation deep-mined coal. Many were killed in mine accidents. Many more, like my grandfather, at 47, died from black lung disease. Other men worked in steel mills. In the first half of the 1900s, 9% of steelworkers died on the job from, e.g., having heavy beams land, or molten steel poured, on them. Similarly, millions have planted, cultivated or harvested crops all day in scorching hot fields. Before those fields were used to grow crops, they needed to be cleared. Imagine cutting thick, massive trees with two-man handsaws all day in very hot summers. Many humans did such work for years, for little or no pay.
Many of them didn’t have a choice. They could work in the mines, on logging crews, in steel mills for horrific hours and even more horrific pay with no safety conditions and never see their families because they were always working or they could starve or freeze to death. I’m sure they would’ve chosen programs that would allow them to work less for more and with safe workplaces so they could spend time with their families and not die early of horrible things like lung cancer. But those things weren’t options.
People like your grandfather and his compatriots did things like form unions in order to get better pay, safer conditions, and fewer hours. They didn’t “internalize risk” because they thought it was “noble” to put more money in the pockets of the CEOs, they “internalized risks” because our capitalist system said “do it or starve”. I know you’d be against the unions, for the same bullshit reasons you gave above. Unions mean workers have rights, which you translate as “being emotionally soft, psychologically frail, and cognitively challenged”.
I think the workers from the past absolutely would have worked in their sweatpants at home if they could have.
Even though 7,600 Americans died daily before Coronamania, during the past three years, many thought, or at least pretended, that no one should get sick or die, no matter how old or overweight.
We were aware that people were dying pre-pandemic. That’s why we’ve been fighting for universal healthcare. And this entire time, you continue to try to punish those of us who aren’t what you think of as perfect. You want the elderly and people with disabilities and those who make what you call “bad choices” to be executed for existing and reminding you of your own mortality.
Our ancestors wouldn’t have sacrificed normal life, an economy and a young generation so that they could work in sweatpants and their party could win elections. Instead, they would have seen the costs of extreme safety-ism, scoffed at the idea of locking down a society over a respiratory virus and understood that the human toll of doing so far exceeded any insincerely-proffered, and ultimately unrealized, benefits.
The people who lived during the Black Death would’ve done just about anything to stop the disease from spreading. You are saying this from a society that has developed things like vaccines and antibiotics. That’s why you think a respiratory illness isn’t scary. It’s because in the past, diseases were so scary we developed methods of dealing with them so we could minimize the deaths and disability caused by disease. Now we have those methods and they’ve been so effective that you just shrug and say “oh well, it’s not scary! Disease has never been scary! Everyone who’s afraid is a dumb fat old coward” when there’s a disease outbreak.