I’m (hopefully) entering a new org soon. Only a few comrades there mask. At my workplace, or anywhere else really, nobody masks. The only people I see mask are like goldfish, and I only see them occasionally in public transit. It’s disheartening by the day to see Covid trivialized, and AES like even China not care anymore, in spite of their good policies beforehand.
Just makes me feel like I cannot relate to people anymore, they all look at me like I’m supremely weird for masking, so it’s even harder to convince people of anything politically, especially when I’m discriminated all the time and receive verbal abuse for masking. I really dont get how to talk to people when they wont understand the concept of masking to protect themselves/others and it makes me feel stuck politically, to the point I feel I have a one sided view of many social issues, through the POV of Covid consciousness and masking, and I dont see how a movement can be built if no one acknowledges this. I feel like I’ve become more disconnected from everyone, including comrades, especially them, because they wont listen or want to mask in the first place, and I dont know what to do. I use an N95 every day when going outside, and so does my partner. We dont eat out, etc. I get the fact many wont do this choice to sacrifice their lifestyle or whatever… but :(
I remember before masking I was taken seriously, now it’s impeding me in all my life’s aspects just cause we live in an extremely ableist society. It’s hard and alienating from others, and no one irl seemingly understands. It’s very hard to see how to build a mass movement in these conditions, or to even socialize with others (and I’m very sociable!) when you’re instantly labeled as weird. I’m so dissapointed in people sometimes I give up on interacting because of this.
Even among comrades, the moment I mention masking, everyone is suddenly awkward and tries to move on. I’m tired to act like it’s a secret or such
I wish things were different. I wish I could connect with people again. And that comrades would take this seriously, because I feel alienated even from those I share the most with, and its painful. I dont want to create a struggle session or whatever, just wanted to feel heard, I hope most people here mask anyways. It’s bad enough for my mental healtg to give up on all social stuff cause of masking, and other activities like swimming, it’s just tough. Thanks for reading
My understanding was that the “emergency over” wasn’t about risk of getting covid, but risk of overwhelming hospitals. At first they didn’t know how it spread and were setting up tents as emergency wards with no meds and insufficient equipment. Once there were treatments and most everyone had been exposed, the crisis point was over and covid was relegated to something like the flu’s status: deadly for some, but oh well. Yes it was and is callous indifference. So were all the individuals who acted like going mask-less was a risk they were willing to take for themselves without seeming to understand that it was a greater risk for everyone around them. At this point, though, I have some understanding that most social people care intensely about seeing faces and would rather risk temporary illness than reduce human contact… despite the fact that the illness may not be temporary. What can I say? Humans are bad at assessing risk.
The opposite would be much more likely: drop precautions, rates shoot up, more people in hospitals.
“Emergency over” was about capital pulling all of its various strings so that there could be a return to certain forms of profit-seeking and bourgeois control over labor. “Emergency over” meant no more lockdowns (labor scarcer and at a premium, land use disrupted). It meant commercial real estate could again speculate like it always does and try to get renters and jack up rents rather than watch their “investments” go poof (this was a big one, it is the main reason why office workers were hen forced to return to the office). It meant pulling the plug on periodic basic guaranteed income payouts and services to support people during lockdowns / the emergency (we then saw a new cycle of primitive accumulation as people were again made poorer and more precarious). Millions of petty bourgeois tyrants all demanding to exploit again (despite being paid to not do so via bailouts and loan forgiveness) and real estate.
Some places yes. I mean Sweden almost immediately attempted “herd immunity” and pretended like the virus only negatively impacted the asiatic hordes or something.
This is actually just a liberal propaganda narrative. It is part of normalization of a pandemic whose response was aborted early by capital. Vaccination rates plummeted, the plug was pulled on propping up pharma companies to make new ones every 6 months and ensure people could actually get vaccinated. As I said originally, excess mortality is still way higher, it is not just “some” people it is more than the flu kills and it is not seasonal. Hospitals were permanently changed and travel nurses normalized, moving where there was greater need in a petty boirgeois-ification of what would otherwise be unionizable work. “Most everyone had been exposed” means nothing when immunity wears off every 6 months, as again, we are still in the middle of the pandemic, there is no herd immunity. The old people just die off and young people get disabled and immune damaged, but because cause isn’t obvious it only appears as statistics and a pile of immunological studies that get ignored, for political reasons, by top brass health officials.
I disagree. It is malleability, a subservience to bourgeois propaganda. Provide the narrative, normalize, and in the forefront discipline labor to force a form of obedience. If everyone has to go to the office, everyone has to be exposed. If a manager says masks are optional, you will get sick with what they have eventually. If a manager says masks must be removed in order to do your job - like sales - you must obey or lose your job. Nothing to protect you, “emergency over”. It is a mass of people susceptible to bourgeois propaganda and coercion then simply accepting the false rationalizations of capital’s propagandists, including the people who claim to be explicitly against this and capable of dismantling it. The same people will cry when they see someone sick and die, when they see heir neighbors tormented by cops, when their friends become homeless through precarity created by marginalization. Their capacity to empathize is not broken, merely short-circuited via conditioning to accept bourgeois narratives and rationalizations for their predicament.
Note the timing on this. In the US, prior to Biden claiming the emergency was over, those people were considered assholes by most liberals. Almost overnight it was entirely normalized and various anti- masker arguments were now acceptable to liberals. Oh now the masks are uncomfortable, they look weird, they don’t work very well, it’s hard to talk in them, poor babies. And again, alleged “leftists” followed suit. Ask yourself what had actually changed, materially, re: public health and the pandemic, at that moment. Were waves over? Vaccines working for over a year? Vaccination rates extremely high? Excess mortality rates “normal”? Or did a bourgeois party politician simply declare it over?l and they fell in line like good citizens?
Do you believe this behavioral sea change came from below? People just wanted to be coughing in each others’ faces at work? Or that the desire to drop $60 at a restaurant to hang out with people led to a groundswell demanding an end to lockdowns and precautions?
What actually happened was a bourgeois politician giving permission to stop and specious rationalizations for why to do so, all at the urging of capital. This is not a human nature debate. And the turn to do so is a very old form of bourgeois propaganda.
That is the part angers me the most, and then extra angry when I found out nurses deemed to need the money more were offered less pay for the same shifts.
I concede. Yours is a better formed description and surely more accurate.
No, I think people have always liked seeing faces. I think people who grew up kissing cheeks as a greeting kept doing it until a younger generation insisted on air kisses (this wasn’t much of a U.S. thing except in certain immigrant families keeping it alive at family gatherings). I remember the generation that would not buckle their seat belts until it was criminalized because that’s how they grew up (similar story for drunk driving). If we’d gotten rid of seat belt laws, I expect that now-old generation would have stopped belting up just like the current generations stopped masking up.
For covid, I expect the vast majority of people over 30ish will never see masks as proper etiquette because they grew up with people coughing and spreading germs at work. I suspect U.S. people who started working in the 1990s or earlier think it better to go to work sick and infect everyone than to stay home because it showed The Boss they are dedicated and they don’t know how to unlearn that.
I also think people have always been bad at risk assessment. If we were better at it, lotteries and casinos couldn’t exist because people would see it as throwing money away despite the thrill of an intermittent reward system. Years back, I read studies showing how we get much better at seeing risk after our teen years, but stop caring as much after… I think it was entering our 60s or so – I’ve forgotten when that starts.
All that said, I do agree that moneyed interests pushed HARD for an end to the lock downs despite on-going risk and I like your framing of it better than mine. Thank you for the well described perspective!
Not sure what its like where you are, but where I live the “temporary” overcapacity measures adopted by hospitals were quietly made permanent. Its become nearly impossible to get treatment in reasonable time; an old guy literally died of a heart attack in the hospital lobby a few months back bc the hospitals are still so overwhelmed
Oooh, that reminds me of a lesson on using ‘metrics’. The story was about the British healthcare system measuring how long people were left in the waiting room, and hospitals got in some sort of trouble if it was too long, soooo hospitals began improving the wait times yet overall care stats remained the same. It turned out this was because the act of measuring the wait time lead to staff getting pressured to be faster without more getting more people or resources, so staff learned to quickly move patients out of the waiting room – done! – only to have them wait unseen in exam rooms or even on gurneys in the halls.
So here we are again adjusting to the new normal.