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Decades ago—long before this surreal pandemic that forever mangled the world as we knew it—I concluded that it was far worse to give someone the common cold by being an inconsiderate, unhygienic slob than to purposely punch them in the face. As someone who’s taken maybe a hundred shots to the face and has endured a hundred colds over his lifetime, I know which is worse. A brief flash of pain and maybe a few days of soreness simply don’t compare to two weeks of sweating and shivering and vomiting and hacking up your lungs.

Life tosses so many unavoidable indignities at you that I bear a special searing hatred for those who make life unnecessarily hard. No matter how ugly the situation, there’s always someone eager to make it uglier.

Social media right now is a worthless cesspool of PTSD and confirmation bias, a psychotic beehive of people who don’t even know how to wipe themselves but are certain they know how this pandemic started and how to end it. I’ll cut them a tiny bit of slack right now because even though I’m not religious, I believe that humans are rotten and will use any crisis to get up on a soapbox to prove how stupid they are. Alas, pretending you’re an expert when you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about is part of the human condition.

At the moment I’d like to focus my boundless reserves of disgust for the people who think it’s cute or funny or somehow empowering to cough in others’ faces while claiming to be infected with coronavirus.

How empty is your life that you’d throw it away just for some attention? If you’re such a shit-stirring loser that you film yourself coughing on others in the hope that you’ll get some YouTube views, you deserve to be beaten with rusty hammers. You should be quarantined in Antarctica with neither an igloo nor a loincloth to keep you warm.

Anyone who purposely coughs on anyone should be forced to surrender both their lungs to a lung bank, provided that “lung banks” exist and could help the true victims of this crisis. Don’t ask me how they’re going to survive with no lungs. They should have asked themselves the same question before they decided to cough on someone and film it with their iPhone.

The Department of Justice recently issued a memo about COVID-19 implying that “Threats to intentionally infect other people” could be classified as terrorism. Of course, it’s never “terrorism” when the government scares everyone, which is basically what they do for a living. Any government that fails at keeping its citizens constantly terrified is quickly overthrown. But on this one small point I can agree—at a time when almost everyone is on edge, anyone who purposely tries to amplify the fear should be squashed like a bug.

In Missouri, a 26-year-old man has been arrested and charged with making terroristic threats for licking food items at a Walmart while saying “Who’s afraid of the coronavirus?,” then uploading the video to YouTube. In Illinois, a man has been arrested after coughing on both food and people at a supermarket while recording himself. A group of “juveniles” in Virginia has been arrested for coughing on supermarket produce and uploading the videos to social media.

A Pennsylvania man is facing charges after reportedly laughing while coughing in an elderly, mask-wearing man’s face at a supermarket and telling him he has the coronavirus. Two New York State women named Lenaysia and Imani have been arrested after allegedly coughing on employees and telling them they had coronavirus, then pepper-spraying employees when they ran outside to catch their license-plate number. A Wisconsin woman was banned from a supermarket after licking a freezer handle and claiming it was a form of “protest” against the pandemic. A Missouri man was taken into custody after allegedly coughing at customers and writing “COVID” on a cooler at a Dollar Tree store. In Minnesota, a man was arrested because according to a police statement:

The man became frustrated using the self-checkout lane and coughed on a white female employee who tried to help him. The employee quickly backed away….A black male employee intervened, and that’s when the man said that racial minorities, namely blacks and others of Asian descent, are to blame for the coronavirus pandemic.

In upstate Pennsylvania, a supermarket was forced by police to toss out $35,000 worth of produce after a woman coughed all over it as part of a “twisted prank.”

The same viral behavior has replicated itself at stores in New Mexico, Texas, North Carolina, and New Jersey.

This will be mistaken as a defense of police officers, although it isn’t—all I’ll say is that I could not handle that job for a week without wantonly beginning to club people, and I’m always bemused to see people who have nervous breakdowns at imaginary crimes such as “misgendering” who think they’d be able to handle the murderous stress of being a cop for even a minute, much less a lifetime.

And naturally, since they’re one of the few groups who absolutely have to be out in public right now witnessing people lose their minds in real time, cops are being spat upon left and right.

In Denver, a woman who was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving after allegedly plowing into four parked cars reportedly spit in a police officer’s face and said, “There’s some corona for you, now all you need is a lime.” In Manchester, England, a man has been jailed for six months after coughing on a police officer and telling him, “I am Covid and I am going to cough in your face and you will get it. A 20-year-old New Jersey man has been arrested for aggravated assault and making terroristic threats after not only kicking police, but coughing and spitting on them while claiming he has the coronavirus. In Florida, 23-year-old Christian Perez made things worse for everyone after being stopped for reckless driving and then coughing in officers’ faces while saying he had COVID-19. “I have the coronavirus and I hope you have it now,” a Texas woman allegedly barked to a state trooper after coughing on him when he’d dared to arrest her for outstanding warrants.  A Pennsylvania woman has been arrested for removing her face mask and intentionally coughing in an officer’s face four times. In New Jersey, a woman who was arrested for drunk driving allegedly coughed on an officer and told him, “Oh, by the way, I have the coronavirus and so do you now.”

As if hospital workers aren’t facing enough terror right now, a fat and ugly Maryland man who has COVID-19 has been arrested after allegedly coughing on several hospital workers and saying it didn’t matter because no one cared about him, anyway. Even more bizarrely, a Connecticut doctor has been arrested for purposely hugging and coughing on nurses at his hospital.

A Colorado man who says he was “stressed” after losing his job and “aggravated” about how people were responding to the crisis apparently thought it would be a good idea to cough in an elderly woman’s face after she asked him to maintain a safe distance from her on a hiking trail.

A Rhode Island middle-school teacher is being investigated after tweeting that she would pay people who were infected with coronavirus to cough on Donald Trump.

A New York man named Baruch Feldheim who has been arrested for allegedly hoarding nearly 200,000 medical masks also reportedly coughed on FBI agents while claiming he had COVID-19.

Two Pennsylvania men have been arrested after a gas-station incident where one of them scolded the other for coughing in public without covering his mouth, then allegedly drove his car into the man, who then allegedly fired four shots at the man’s car.

If you think that a crisis brings out the best in people, I beg to differ.

On March 21, a Detroit bus driver recorded an eight-minute video that went viral in which he complained about passengers wantonly coughing in public:

We out here as public workers, doing our jobs, trying to make an honest living to take care of our families, but for you to get on the bus and stand on the bus and cough several times without covering up your mouth…that lets me know that some folks don’t care. Utterly don’t give a fuck, excuse my language.

Less than two weeks later, the driver was dead of complications from COVID-19.

In light of all this, one of the few things that made me happy this week was this clip of some fat little turd coughing and spitting in the face of someone he apparently thought was trapped inside a subway car—until the person pried the doors open and beat the offender’s head into the concrete.

It’s time to put a nail in the coughin’. This situation is already plenty grim—so grim that in a month it may be painfully evident that the majority of people are not mentally equipped to deal with it. Therefore, anyone who takes action to make it worse should be sent to Guantanamo post-haste.