This isn't specifically about you. It's about us.
the covid complicity of the majority and the solidarity of the informed minority
I tried to sound a warning. I figured, if I have information that’s important, my friends will listen to me. They’re rational, caring humans.
I posted some things on Instagram. I started (maybe, or maybe it was the 3rd or 4th thing) with a story, my own text - 'Omicron isn’t mild. Long Covid will fuck you up’. etc. No engagement. I went harder. I reposted tweets from doctors like Lisa Iannattone and T. Ryan Gregory. Things that implied a shocking truth. Things that would have started me on a Google spree, diving down the rabbithole.
No engagement.
I told specific people that this was worse than most of us thought it was. I used language that I thought should have been alarming. It wasn’t, apparently. I got back the usual pablum - “I just need to live my life”. “I don’t have room for this stuff in my head right now”. I tried to explain that repeated infection would just make whatever you’re trying to prioritize, harder. I emphasized that I had science to back up what I was saying. I worried that something was already wrong with their brains.
Now I hide, because how do you continue a relationship with someone when you TOLD THEM what was going to happen to themselves and their kids, and they ignored you? How do you watch that happen, knowing maybe you could have said more, could have gone to their house (with a mask on ofc) and shaken them by the shoulders while screaming in their face or something. I should have done that, right? I didn’t do that. And I can’t watch. I feel this guilt. I’m horrified. I cannot be a spectator to this thing, not that close.
I can’t be a part of someone’s life after that, when I see the wave that they denied beginning to crash down on their head. When their kids are having worse and worse ‘behavior issues’. When they’re suddenly complaining about the pains of ‘getting old’ and like me, they’re only a couple years older than they were in 2019. I told you, my key people, and you refused to protect yourselves or those who you are legally responsible for. You allowed yourself to be lead quietly into complicity in this horror.
It feels specifically hard for me, with my weird, unique, boring, tragic story. I can’t be seen as delusional or someone to be managed by those who are less tethered to reality than I - that’s still too painful, too on the nose, I’m still not healed enough. Maybe more critically, I must protect myself from my own complicity when I didn’t push harder. Because I thought there was a relationship to salvage, I didn’t want to say anything really hurtful. I didn’t want to insult anyone’s intelligence or make them feel like bad parents. Now I wish I had.
This is just the start. It’s only December 2022. We’ve only been doing this for 10 months or so. I said that too, long before December 2022. It’s not a new normal, it’s not back to normal, it’s a rapidly deteriorating situation. The deterioration is accellerative. That was ignored too.
All this had an eventual result.
For me, this created a new ‘us’ and you’ve excluded yourself.
This new ‘us’ is engaged with reality at a ‘not just reading the headlines’ level. This new ‘us’ heard experts telling us to keep masking for the sake of the vulnerable, and took that advice, because only a monster wouldn’t, right? This new ‘us’ - this new ‘we’ - we still don’t understand why nobody else did, when this too was in those headlines, and didn’t have to be dug for. We don’t have to understand how or why you are that way though. We understand how we are this way, and that we’re somehow fundamentally different. We’re not turning away when kids die. We’re not making up excuses. We’re not childishly prioritizing brunch, or sports, or concerts, over the health of children (and our own health). Some of us, especially those who are parents, have made huge sacrifices. Quitting jobs, homeschooling while working full-time. All the stuff you made very clear that you could not consider, even to save your own child’s life and future health.
But I watch my new friends do this. And they’re doing it. And it’s hard and painful and exhausting and isolating. And they’re still doing it. And I try to lift them up in my small way, give them the moral support that I’d reserved for other people, once.
I don’t have kids, but I’m doing stuff that feels hard, too. I’d love to eat inside a restaurant again. Man, I’d go buckwild. What’s the hottest restaurant in the city? Fuck it, it’s been 3 years, I’ll splash out. Except I don’t, because I know I cannot. Because I heard the message that the vulnerable must be protected and I understood that to be true. Because I’ve read the mountain of science that shows that this virus will wreck your life if you just passively submit to repeated infections. So I walk into the grocery store with a mask on even though I get ‘looks’ and am risking a confrontation if I were to run into the wrong person on the wrong day. I give up the idea of seeing my new favourite band live because there isn’t a venue in the city that seems remotely safe. I mourn the chance to see my old favourite band live, not only because it’s unsafe, but because their legendary guitarist is now off the tour, suffering at home with Long Covid for the 14th or 15th month.
Ringo, Elton, Stephen, Justin, Harry, Dave. It almost feels like a further insult, given how much I lean on music to manage the isolation. They don’t all know either, these superstars who are dropping like flies. But they weren’t my friends.
Now we’re starting to ask a question, among ourselves, this new ‘us’. I’m not sure if anything specific spurred it beyond all the kids finally getting sick in this shocking and depressing way, after we’d warned for months that this would happen. What makes ‘us’, ‘us’? Why are we different? Why does nobody else seem to care about their fellow humans? Why does nobody else seem to care about kids, even their own? We know it’s not impossible because we see each other doing it, doing the stuff that seems non-optional in all sorts of different life circumstances.
Is this a result of some sort of priming? Some shared trauma that we all experienced when we realized help wasn’t on the way? Is it before that? Some other, not shared but common trauma that showed us the world is hard and people are unreliable? But I didn’t think people were that unreliable. Or, I thought the unreliable ones were a minority. Or, I didn’t think they were such a massive majority. This is new for me and it’s still shocking and raw and most of this new ‘us’ sees that the same way I’m pretty sure.
We’re going to continue to talk about it. Maybe we’ll get to the core of it. Maybe we won’t. The only thing we really know right now is that we are tragically, dangerously small in number.
This isn’t specifically about you. It’s about almost everyone. And I wish I could offer a way for you to get off that poorly chosen amusement park ride, and get on my better chosen one. But I feel like it’s too late. We keep us safe. Us.