The New "Dirty"

There was a video going around this week of Vice President Kamala Harris greeting the leader of South Korea. The interchange included a hand shake after which Vice President Harris wiped her hand on her suit coat/pants. It's hard to imagine she was doing anything other than wiping her hand but she almost seemed to catch herself doing it because her hand kind of froze there against her clothes as if maybe she didn't want to move it and maybe catch someone's attention. It was strange. What it brings to mind, of course, is the way uppity people tend to see people beneath them as dirty but I got to thinking, that's probably not what she was wiping off of her hand. What she was wiping off her hand was Covid. Nobody has been shaking anybody's hands for the past fourteen or fifteen months because of the threat of the Covid viruses. Kamala was reacting to the habit of seeing a hand shake as a dirty risky thing. Like hey man, where's the hand sanitizer? No doubt the fact that he was a foreigner made the habitual perceived threat even greater.

Soon we will all find ourselves in this boat full of "dirty" people. The new "dirty" will be the unvaccinated, easily identified by the masks they will be forced to wear. Kamala just demonstrated the acceptable way to discriminate against them.