Vaporstrike

Yeah part of the reason why I'm capital-L Like This nowadays can be traced back to some covid safety related betrayals in 2020 and the accompanying feelings of mortal terror

I feel like instead of asking about our childhood the disaster counselor is yelling “why don’t you want to work” but: big yeah

I also feel like it's just revealed that a lot of cultures are just... broken. Like really fundamentally broken, in a way I don't know how to process.

a whole lot of people saw through the looking glass to what capitalism really is, and media and capital are desperate to put the lid back on that pandora's box, and exploiting people's grief and desperation for normalcy in the process

i think it's why everything feels like it's escalating even faster than it was pre-pandemic. we have witnessed an incalculable breach of trust on every level, and now everyone is out for themselves.

This is reminding me - the other day I was with my partner and we suddenly remembered we went almost an entire year without touching each other. (We weren't long distance but we didn't live together and, also, I was working as an urgent care nurse.) And we cried and held each other and for all the romantic drama potential I've never seen anything like that reflected in media. It ought to be a great "soldier comes home from the war" story setup but oops it's Political.

Minneapolis resident too? I still have a hell of a time describing what happened and what it was like to be there, and I wasn't even at ground zero. Plus pandemic, plus isolation, plus political parties that did not give a shit about me and mine?

It sucks the most when part of you unconsciously buys into the "let's all move on! No big deal!" You ask yourself over and over "Why am I still like this? Why aren't I all better and out there like everyone else" forgetting we all didn't have the same experience or take it seriously.

I was kinda woken up to the media blackout on civd when i saw Coming 2 America. It was one of thise things were the year didnt matter alot, but it was clearly taking place in present day (2021) i didnt make much of it until there was a scene where two main characters screamed in each others faces and i thiught to myself "OMG you're going to catch covid, what are you doing?"

And that scene sorta de-suspended my disbelief, no masks, no social distancing, i think this might've even been before the vaccine was wodely available. After that i realized alot of the media just existed in an alternate 2020+ where covid just never happened. There's one or two exceptions where maybe online classes/work is the focal point, but all other media to the best of my knowledge just avoided the topic altogether.

At first i thought it was a big conspiracy to erase covid from collective memory, but i think the simpler answer is production companies wldont want to be a bummer and age their work by including artifacts of a national tragedy.

I kinda went down a rabbit hole and wondered if this thing happened with other American Tragedies. Closest thing i could think of was 9/11, and i think from the one book i read it may have been a similar deal. I'd be curious to do more resesrch of this kinda thing in the media.

When I mention that this is the second pandemic I've directly worked I get stares, because everyone forgot H1N1 even happened. That one was much less of a disruption, yes, but it still devastated lives.

I had someone ask me why I was wearing my n95 at a meeting today. Like, they genuinely didn't get why I might have it on. Not in a malicious way, this acquaintance isn't that sort of person. They'd just pushed covid out of their mind so completely at this point that it didn't even register.

The world is awful, and we all can't pretend not to know now. We made these rules. We can change them. It doesn't have to be like this, but nothing seems to make progress against it. It's depressing on a fundamental level.

I'm so fucking sorry. I've lived all of this too, combined with the fact that I had a lot of hermit tendencies before lockdown. I also realized while writing this that I kinda needed to let out a scream myself.

I am the only person in my branch still wearing an N95. The others might put on a surgical mask sometimes when they go out in front but they'll take it off in the back office like it's nothing. I recently went to an in person meeting (no remote options anymore) where there were nearly 40 people in the room. Three people had masks: me in an N95, someone wearing a cloth mask, and a third person wearing a KN95 who apologized if they were hard to hear because it was their first day back from sick leave for COVID "and [they were] still getting over it a bit."

In that moment I felt a lot of emotions, but most saliently, I felt so alone in that crowd of people that I experienced it as physical pain. The same fucking people who went through the same fucking alienation I did are starting to play into the pantomime about how Everything's Better Now because they've been so comprehensively failed by the authority above us. I can say all I want to my direct coworkers about things, and they'll hmm and ahh and nod along sympathetically, and they'll go right back to not wearing masks, going out to bars and concerts, and wondering aloud if this allergy season's worse for everyone or just them.

It's gotten very hard not to respond to patron questions/comments about my mask with anything but barely concealed venom. I tell them it's because of immunocompromised family members, which is a lie. I lie because it's a lie people will accept, whereas concern for the existence of immunocompromised people I do not personally know but can absolutely affect with my decisions is apparently incomprehensible to them.

Something I've come to realize from all this is that the classic example of human irrationality, novelty bias in risk assessment, is actually completely sensible. A new risk you've never encountered before should spur you to maximum avoidance, that's more important than the routine of your social reproduction. At some point that balance shifts, though, and the risk has to become routine because you have to resume some kind of routine of material and psychological care.

This is something I always try to leaven the capitalist social murder stuff with: we actually don't know how to survive something like this. Even with complete democratic control of the economy we would have been faced with impossible choices pitting basic and social needs against lives. An airborne virus just strikes us, like the bats it came from, at our weakest point: our habit of living close together in caves.

i feel insane when people ask me to vote for local democrats. did you not see what those fuckers and their cops were doing the last several years? why are they not terrified to self defense that their apocalypse will be the next one flushed down the media hole with bipartisan support?

Suddenly remembering that the Fed injected 1.5 TRILLION dollars into the stock market at the start of everything, almost overnight, and squabbled over fucking unemployment and SNAP benefits and student loan relief for years.