Coughing and Sneezing in Someone’s Face: The Phlegm of Opinion

Imagine sneezing, and splattering someone with your phlegm, intentionally.
That image lives within the realm of cringe.
You wouldn’t even walk over to the couple at the far end of the restaurant, and take a deep pull from your Lucky Strike, to full-on bomb their faces with clouds of second-hand smoke?
This stuff happens in movies and badly executed TikTok pranks.
In the real world these things could get you killed.
But you’ll cough up every half-formed thought into the open air as if the world begged for your mucus of opinion.
No one asked for it, yet it drips across timelines, meetings, family dinners, sprayed without handkerchief or consideration.
“Freedom of speech” becomes the sign you hold up when questioned about appropriate conduct. Sure, you will also forget about freedom of response at times.
The old diseases had incubation periods and symptoms we could prepare for.
This one is instantaneous, a plague of takes, certainties, judgments, an endless spray of “I think” and “in my view” that clings to everyone nearby.
We wash our hands, wear masks, keep our distance, but yeah, there is no sanitizer for your endless broadcast of self-importance and entitlement.
At least germs have the courtesy to die on surfaces. Your opinion lingers, multiplying in echoes, retweets, and people you hurt without a second thought.

We know all of the above, we live through it, and still inflict it on others. And so the coughing continues, opinions are launched like shrapnel from a dirty bomb, not to heal or to change a thing, only to create wounds that fester in silence, or at the very least, adding to the irrelevance and noise we already live in.

How much did you cough up today, without changing anything in the world?