Heather Christena Schmidt

I’ve decided to jump on the weekly newsletter bandwagon. Everyone seems to be doing it, so why not follow the cool kids? Moreover, for myself, it’s an easy way to ensure I’m posting on my blog in a timely manner – at least once a week. Plus… we have so much catching up to do every week.

Those of you that have been around for a while know that I used to do a weekly segment I called STFU Fridays, in which I weekly took on someone or something I felt needed a good talking to laden with swear words and firm STFUs. So that will be returning along with this weekly newsletter, to conclude each issue.

If you aren’t yet registered to receive these and other blog updates via email please do so here. And now, let’s get to it.

Around the World

The world has become an overwhelming and crazy place. Every time I log onto the Internet – be it social media, the news, or just my email – I feel inundated with bad news.

But it isn’t just bad news, it’s weird news. Dare I say… bat shit crazy news?

Last year during the election, I learned about the QAnon phenomenon, now lovingly coined the GQP. They’ve hijacked the Republican party as far as I can tell, and while hard and fast Democrats are probably sitting back in their seats, rubbing their bellies and chuckling, the rest of us are just sitting here in abject horror wondering just what in the fuck is going on.

This week in QAnon quackery, the conspiracies are running wild over masks, school openings, and vaccine requirements. But what I want to focus on is this guy from Santa Barbara, California (just a bit north from where I live) who murdered his two children because QAnon conspiracy told him that his wife had serpent DNA, which was then passed on to the children. His name is Matthew Taylor Coleman, and reportedly he is a surf instructor which just highlights the most terrifying point of QAnon and cults like it: literally anyone can be in them. Even my neighbor is in QAnon, which I hear her talk about practically every day as she squawks on the phone about Trump and Q so loudly the entire street can hear it. Back to this murder, he had apparently taken the kids from their home in Santa Barbara, drove to Mexico, murdered them with a fishing spear (horrific), and then confessed when the FBI caught up to him on a hot tip from the wife back home.

Tragic and insane.

Meanwhile, in Tennessee, the crazies screamed and ranted over mask mandates outside a school board meeting, at one point screaming “we will find you” while surrounding the healthcare workers there to speak in support of the face coverings. What is it about a piece of cloth that has made people go so crazy? You can enjoy the threats here (just look at that guy’s face!):

And then, if you can stomach it, this sermon that went viral this week from a preacher that claims y’all don’t need masks and vaccines if you have Jesus. If you look closely enough, you can see the Crisco glistening down his forehead:

This last year and a half sure has had its fair share of Karens and Kens screaming at the proverbial managers about stupid shit, but this newest rendition of the mask thing really takes the cake. The only real parallel I can think of was when Deb – our local Trump supporter and anti-masker – was dragged out of one of our local Trader Joe’s for throwing vegetables and refusing to don a mask. But even that pales in comparison to the angry mobs now descending with threats and violence that we are seeing today.

(Boy have these people not grown through this pandemic.)

Around My World

Well my life hasn’t been exactly excitement and fan fair since the pandemic began. My husband is still working at home, and most of you probably already know that he works overnight and long hours, plus it’s noisy film editing work. So the majority of our days are fueled with caffeine, toddler meltdowns, teens who really need more consistency and quiet, and a desperate return to some normalcy with sports.

Of course along came the Delta variant, and a lot of our “back to normal” plans went poof. So around my world, I’ve been spending the last week canceling plans. Travel, get togethers… all just gone, thanks to that pesky pandemic that I of all people should have known wasn’t going to just go away with the snap of a finger.

My other new hobby, though, is roasting our local city and county leadership. I like to think of my community as the Florida of Southern California. While we aren’t quite as bad as Orange County, our Business Lives Matter most mentality is pervasive through out every sector of our local government. This is only accentuated by the fact that we have people elected and appointed to these positions who fall into two categories:

1. Those thoroughly unqualified to lead a community through a pandemic of a deadly disease; and,
2. Those qualified but choosing not to do a damn thing anyway (including – most glaringly – a nurse on my city council).

So I sit, along with many others, from behind my computer screen, vaccine wall, and KN95 masks, and question the dereliction of duty at this stage on the most local of levels. In particular, as it applies to kids. With this new variant, they are seeing more and more kids get sick and hospitalized. Our county’s advice to combat this? “We encourage hand washing;” while they wind down vaccination efforts, host super spreading events on a weekly basis with no pandemic safety measures in place… but I digress…

Ultimately, while I don’t think my incessant complaining in the comments, in letters to the editor, and on Twitter threads are stopping the widespread spikes in disease and death we are seeing in our county, most of them outright ignored by elected officials at all levels (the commentary from me, as well as the disease and death), what I do know is that I’m moving the needle even if just a bit on what information they give us. In a community where burying our heads in the sand until it all goes away on its own may as well be engraved in the county logo as our live-and-die by motto, I consider this at least a marginal win.

STFU Fridays

Keeping in line with this, and other themes, as of late: the pandemic has brought to us a big group constituting roughly 90+ million Americans that need to just shut the fuck up already: anti-vaxxers.

Have any of you encountered a more idiotic bat-shit-ass crazy group of people before? These people will believe anything they read from the friend of a friend’s cousin who posted a YouTube video of some crackpot in suspenders yelling before a school board.

It’s so cult-like too. They haven’t all simply formed their own beliefs and arguments that are sound in thinking about vaccines, and to a lesser-extent masks. They all parrot the same lines, in cycles. Either it’s what they’ve seen more recently on Newsmax, or what is running in their QAnon phone tree. It’s exhausting, repetitive, and wrong.

To these weak-willed people, I just have to say: if you’re scared, stay home! If you’re afraid of a little needle, stay home! If you really believe a sheep dewormer is the cure for COVID, perhaps you are the true sheeple of the bunch!

Lumped into this group of weak-willed ninnies afraid of modern medicine, though, are the local politicians and public health officers who need to shut the fuck up with their Twitter statements and public sentiments about people’s right to “have a discussion with their doctor about whether or not the shot is right for them.” Newsflash: with a very limited exception of people for whom have serious medical issues (like an allergy to an ingredient), the shot is for everybody. Shut the fuck up with this mamby-pamby policymaking that has allowed people cowering in their uneducated boots to hold all of us hostage.

To the people unwilling to create more assertive public health policies, like mandating vaccines for city and county employees, and creating vaccine passport systems for high risk areas like restaurants and gyms: if you aren’t going to start doing your job, shut the fuck up and step aside to let someone else willing to do it take your place.

To the anti-vaxxers citing Tucker Carlson and Bob the QAnon Shaman with every conspiracy theory or crackpot confirmed bias as a reason to not get a vaccine: SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STAY HOME.

Or, at the very least, if you’re going to insist on living among the population as a willfully unvaccinated individual – as the mouth breathing, plague rats of society that you all are – wear a mask when you go places. That’s the real problem in the end anyway. The antivaxxers also don’t believe in masks or COVID or – apparently – their ultimate fate like the rest of ours (death).

Newsflash to those of you in this germ-infested underbelly of society: you aren’t the only people on this planet that exist. You don’t have a right to infect other people because you think it’s no big deal to you. Your freedoms are not more valuable than those of anyone else. You are not the center of the universe. Your narcissism, your psychopathy… all of that may tell you otherwise, but you need to tell that side of you to shut the fuck up too.

We are all tired of this; exhausted really. At the end of the day, everyone makes their own choices for themselves, right? Fine. Just shut the fuck up about it and put a mask over your face that nobody really wants to look at anyway.