Yeah fuck this guy. Fuck everything about him.

I, too, was alive during The Great Gay Plague. So were a lot of us. And yeah - it killed a lot of amazing people. but these "communities" the author talks about, as if the "gay community" were the only community of note before or since, were insular by design. Homosexuals hung out with homosexuals, talked to homosexuals, ate with homosexuals, had sex with homosexuals. This allowed the heterosexual majority to point to AIDS as a disease of sin, and its victims as reapers of what they sowed. It still is - people won't say it aloud anymore, but there's an implied guilt in an HIV-positive status that you've done something to deserve it. And Tammy Faye had gay AIDs patients on the PTL club and it was scandalous. And Princess Di visited an AIDS ward and you'd think she was curing leprosy. And it got Rock Hudson and that meant that Rock Hudson was a sinner, not that AIDS got everybody and even when Magic Johnson announced his HIV status there was an implied "wages of sin" to his exposure.

Suicide? Wages of sin. Overdose? Wages of sin. Nobody accidentally commits suicide. You can't catch a drug overdose from a transfusion. And white women are dying in droves and they're dying in the middle of the country and they're dying in record numbers, but somehow that's MY FAULT:

Utopians on the coasts occasionally feel obliged to dream up some scheme whereby the unnecessariat become useful again, but its crap and nobody ever holds them to it. If you even think about it for a minute, it becomes obvious: what if Sanders (or your political savior of choice) had won? Would that fix the Ohio river valley? Would it bring back Youngstown Sheet and Tube, or something comparable that could pay off a mortgage? Would it end the drug game in Appalachia, New England, and the Great Plains? Would it call back the economic viability of small farms in Illinois, of ranching in Oklahoma and Kansas? Would it make a hardware store viable again in Iowa, or a bookstore in Nevada? Who even bothers to pretend anymore?

What the FUCK do you think I owe "Youngstown Sheet and Tube?" See, I have nothing against the Ohio river valley. Given the choice between helping the Ohio river valley or hurting the Ohio river valley I'll take help, every time. Most people would. But it's not like I don't have my own problems. Do they matter?

This isn’t the first time someone’s felt this way about the dying. In fact, many of the unnecessariat agree with you and blame themselves- that’s why they’re shooting drugs and not dynamiting the Google Barge. The bottom line, repeated just below the surface of every speech, is this: those people are in the way, and its all their fault. The world of self-driving cars and global outsourcing doesn’t want or need them. Someday it won’t want you either. They can either self-rescue with unicorns and rainbows or they can sell us their land and wait for death in an apartment somewhere. You’ll get there too.

Is it your fault? No. But is it MY fault? HELL no. And if you want to assume a pure position in which narcotics don't play, don't for a second assume I'm after your shitty land, bitch. Assume that maybe I don't know the magnitude of your problems, maybe you don't know the magnitude of mine, but maybe we oughtta put heads together rather than declare war if you want help finding a way out of your mess.

I didn't vote for NAFTA, bitch. And in my home town, the 50-under-50 obituaries meant drug-related murder. The suicides? That shit was spelled out.

'cuz apparently the desert Southwest is less passive-aggressively dickish than wherever you're at.