at the end of 2020 we were still living the fantasy that the vaccines would save us. if we'd been better informed we might have seen through the farce, but like so many others we were caught up the promise of a quick fix, and thought if we could just hold out til spring we'd be freed from the shock and dread of certain illness.

by the end of 2021, it was obvious the vaccines couldn't outpace the greed of capital, and whatever good the shots were doing was offset by the eagerness of our overseers to sweep the still-mounting toll of the pandemic under the rug and urge us back to the business of making them richer. the omicron wave exemplified this administrative hypocrisy, as hospitals and morgues overflowed with people who trusted the neoliberal shills assuring us the worst was past.

the devastation of 2022 is somehow even worse. the caution we learned early in the pandemic is treated as pathological; the fleeting solidarity of a shared vision of public health paved over by racial & class violence. the virus continues to evolve new mechanisms of chronic, sometimes fatal physical and cognitive injury. a generation of kids is getting sicker and sicker because the state would rather roll the dice on their survival than build infrastructure to make us all safer.

i don't know where we go from here. as many have observed, COVID is far from a unique site of inequity. all of these dynamics have played out for generations, always against those deemed socially expendable or less-than-human. what does feel novel is the breadth of this new definition of (to borrow the term from Beatrice Adler Bolton and Artie Vierkant) surplus, and the likelihood that, within a decade or so, the number of people able to physically do the labor capital demands may drop below some terminal threshold. what happens when we're all too sick to be seen as worth saving by the trillionaire class? will we still have the collective energy to fight back?