In Argentina, gated communities are extremely popular with the wealthy. They are pretty, crime-free, close-knit, clean, and completely closed to outsiders. Do you know what such a gated community is called?

Country.

Like that, with an English word. “Vivo en un country.”

Only rich people deserve a country anymore. They could live anywhere but they want to live in a country, something they are denying everybody else.

So the next time they are shitting on your country, remember that they’d never say a bad word about their own. Your country is racist and located on “stolen land.” Theirs? Never. They need to destroy yours to feel comfortable in their own.

The country where the vaccine propaganda is completely out of control is Russia. I can no longer read any of my favorite gossip websites and social media accounts because it’s wall-to-wall COVID-mongering. Endless pictures of people on ventilators, stories of young people dying of COVID en masse. I just wanted to read about my favorite fashionable ladies having cat fights and posing in cute outfits, not see gut-wrenching stories about piles of unvaccinated corpses.

We went to an indoor kids’ entertainment place yesterday. There were screamy notices that masks are obligatory on every wall. We didn’t wear masks. Other patrons mostly wore their masks around their chins but they all gave us dirty looks.

It’s not health that preoccupied them. It’s that some people have the inner freedom not to perform rituals demonstrating obedience.