Schadenfreude in the time of the pandemic.

Isn't it nice that we have an urban, well-to-do, young couple who didn't wear masks inside their own bio bubble and sealed air-conditioned car, and created a bit of a storm (when stopped by the police) that ended with their abject apologies and public humiliation giving us all such a wave of schadenfreude that relieved us of all the responsibility of worrying about, discussing, or focusing on this government's idiocy in time of a worldwide pandemic, made even more ridiculous by the supreme court's interpretation of the masking rule that ignores the public rallies and election campaigning but focuses on the individual car owner?

Isn't it nice and soothing for our conscience that we get to blame this silly couple in their expensive car and laugh at them as the government takes off our pants and buggers us from behind?

If this is not indicative of the state of this country, where citizens have voted more than once to see minorities and women, outsiders and aliens, imagined and real enemies buggered in public even as those very citizens are being buggered by the regime they chose to assuage their impotent anger over not being in charge of their own fates, I don't know what is.

Sigh! We are so easily misled and our attention so simply diverted.

P.S: Last year, it was videos of police hitting and beating up random citizens breaking the lockdown that were equally gleefully shared. We are such suckers for seeing other people humiliated because we are ourselves so powerless and it makes us feel good to watch someone else being at the short end of the stick for a change.