When I tell people that the pandemic is mostly over, Omicron is mild, and the UK finally repealed the mask mandates, they react like a toddler who’s told that mommy doesn’t love him. The wounded, orphaned look of existential dread on their faces shows that they trauma-bonded to COVID and now COVID is their mommy.
And they won’t let anybody take mommy away from them.
Liberty is a responsibility.
Individual liberty is an individual responsibility.
The current crop of 20-somethings is the third generation raised to believe that the government will keep them safe if it has enough power.
Pretty sure about 80% of any population, at any point in history, would prefer the responsibility of liberty be on someone not themselves.
When Poland was freed from the yoke of the socialist regime, many people felt sad and abandoned. Some people just want to be told what to do and how to behave. Covid is a security blanket for many. They’ve experienced the comfort of not making decisions, ergo, not ever being wrong. There is always something else/somebody else to blame for their failures and misfortunes. And of top of that, they get to be the morally superior kind with their ‘saving lives’ and ‘protecting others’ nonsense.
I think you nailed it. There are a lot of people who really enjoy calling people like me science deniers who just want to kill Granny. (Which is kind of silly, since I AM Granny.)
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A lot of young people are the electoral base of the ruling party. They would not know how it was like in Poland in the 80s. But they know that if you have a choice between getting 500 PLN from the government or not, they will go and vote for the said ruling party. Especially that there is no alternative that really makes sense.
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” young people are the electoral base of the ruling party”
My job is dealing with Polish young people (highly educated but from what I can tell this is true of those outside the university too, at least where I am in western Poland).
It’s true they know almost nothing about the PRL (it’s largely excluded from school curricula). But social welfare doesn’t have any great appeal for them. They want to work and be independent and not be taken care of. They’re more for privatization of things like healthcare and housing than I am…
Young people don’t vote. They know this hurts them, but… they are extremely apathetic about voting.
They do not like PiS, mention the name of the party (or certain political figures) and their faces contort in disgust.
They don’t benefit from PiS programs (they no longer get married while they’re students, that used to be the norm but now it’s a very rare exception). They no longer want to move in with parents when they get married and this is delaying marriage because becoming independent (while far more achievable now than in the past) is still difficult before their early 30s.
The culture war issues don’t resonate with them at all. A large majority is pro-choice, pro-gay rights (still iffy about adoption).
A small percentage (mostly male) kind of likes some further right parties (from Konfederacja) but even they don’t care about the culture war stuff, it’s more… geopolitical in nature as they think PiS is weak on defense and too pro-Russia.
The PiS electoral base tends to be older (nostalgic about the PRL safety net) and more eastern (a proxy for less educated and less affluent). Those who benefit from PiS policies are the elderly and maybe precarioius middle-agers.
I will agree that at present the opposition doesn’t have anything like a coherent alternative to PiS since they spend most of their time jockeying for position within some new, imaginary Sejm where they’re the majority…
“COVID is their mommy”
You should show them some compassion… after all they lost their domineering daddy. They were really going to show him a thing or two… someday…. and now he’s deserted them.
Now, their distant, strict refrigerator mommy is going to abandon them too?
She was kind of cold and unfeeling but cuddling up to her was better than the wire mothers they’re used to….
Meanwhile, Epoch Times (as a source, sometimes iffy, but they’re not hinting here– they’re making some legally-actionable claims. I don’t think they’re lying) follows the money… and finds the payoff that got us a unified front with The Science (TM) insisting in public that the virus never came from a lab… polar opposite of what they were saying in private.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
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