my first close encounter with two corona Karens

It seems you can no longer go on a walk out to Jamshil Bridge and back without being accosted for not wearing a mask.  To be clear, whenever I'm distance walking, I never wear my mask:  it's utterly pointless when you're outside, and there's zero chance of catching the virus in all that randomly moving, open air.  But people are fearful, and people are sheep who think their government is all-wise and all-powerful, so almost everyone else is masked up in a superstitious attempt to keep the evil spirits at bay.  This means, of course, that I must be the selfish one, the one who, by not wearing a mask, wants other people to die.

I had reached Jamshil Bridge and turned around.  Five minutes after my U-turn, two high-school or college-aged girls passed me, giggling.  When they were safely past me (what I'd call "a coward's distance"), one of them sang out, "Mosque!" in poorly accented English.  The other girl, immediately noting her friend's fuck-up, sang out "Mask!" in better-accented English.  I simply ignored them and walked on because I knew that anything I might have done to them would have landed me in jail—assuming I were fast enough to make up for the coward's distance they had put between me and them.  See, this is why we need guns:  to catch the shitheads who think they're uncatchable.

I admit I brooded for a while as I continued on, but the anger faded after a few minutes.  The only thing that disturbed me, afterward, was the thought that this was my first-ever encounter with corona Karens in Korea and, just like when you sight your first roach in your apartment, your reptilian brain reminds you that, where there's one filthy pest or filthy corona Karen, there are always more, so be on the alert.  

In other words, I'll be thinking about the possibility of Korean Karens from now on, which sucks.  I had gotten used to the idea that Karening wasn't done in Korea.  Sure, I've seen the news video of people confronting a maskless subway passenger (almost always a defiant and/or drunk older man), but I actually think those folks are in their rights to demand that the man mask up.  I tend to mask up in subways, cabs, and buildings.  Also, like the rest of the irrational public, when I'm in a restaurant, I arrive masked, then I take the mask off once the food arrives, and I eat maskless.  I readily agree that such behavior is utterly inconsistent with the rationale for wearing a mask at all, but all of us have been inconsistent, in one way or another, during this entire pandemic.  And the death rate for COVID-19 remains low.  Stop obsessing over the raw numbers—look at the percentages.*

Another annoyance during today's walk:  right after my encounter with the two bitches, a woman walking her dog refused to move out of the way as she approached me.  We stopped and stood firm; I gestured for her to move.  She refused.  I grumbled and stepped around her, saying loudly, "You're supposed to walk on the right, you know."  She didn't respond.  This was almost a mirror image of the previous situation:  the two Karens thought of me as a rule-breaker, and now, I was thinking of this dog-walker as a rule-breaker.  I had to smile at that.  Too bad I hadn't been wearing my "WALK RIGHT" tee shirt.  I would've pointed at that and waited for her to move.  Not that she would have:  she was being a bitch, too.

Crap like this happens in clusters.  I can go a long time thinking everything is fine and dandy with this little slice of peninsular humanity, then something like these two incidents will happen—back to back—and I start thinking about how shitty a lot of the locals are.  The feeling fades over time, and I stop fantasizing about using telekinesis to shatter skulls and toss corpses into the Han River.

Maybe what I really need is a nice pair of throwing axes.

__________

*An angry commenter and long-time reader of this blog tried making that point to me, a while back, before telling me that he was never coming back to the Hairy Chasms.  He mentioned the thousands of US deaths, but you know what?  My response is a yawn.  The US deaths for the pandemic to date are now over 500,000, but that number is wildly exaggerated given what counts as a "corona" death:  if you die in a car crash while infected, you're listed as a corona death in most states.  That's utter bullshit.  I wouldn't be surprised to find out that most of the supposed corona deaths actually had a different proximate cause.  And even if we accept that exaggerated number, what's 500,000 people out of 325-or-so million?  It's 0.154 percent, is what it is.  Christ—that's what's scaring you?  That mortality rate?  And of the people who have legitimately died of COVID-19, probably 80-90 percent of them were old, i.e., well over 60.  Most of the rest probably had comorbidities, i.e., preexisting diseases and conditions that were already affecting their health and weakening their immune systems.  Here are some other death stats to freak about about if you're really that fearful:

US deaths from car accidents:  approx. 35,000/year on average

US deaths from smoking-related lung cancer:  approx. 130,000/year

US deaths from murder:  approx. 16,000/year

US deaths from heart disease:  approx. 647,000/year

So until I see you evincing the same desperate urgency about heart disease, etc., spare me your obviously misplaced self-righteous anger. In the meantime, and in your own life, do what Texas is doing:  open everything up and get the fuck back on track.  I know the liberal crowd will be eagerly watching and waiting to see Texas's COVID death toll start to rise, but I doubt it's going to rise all that much, and if it does, it's probably because of all the illegal-immigrant traffic once again coming across the border now that Biden has stopped work on the wall and relaxed border controls.  Texas really ought to take matters into its own hands and lock down the border by itself.  The 10th Amendment, the basis for US federalism, gives Texas the right to protect its own border as it sees fit.  (This may already have started.)