It is year 5, friends, and I will be honest: I am not doing great! My wife and I have been hit once again this evening with the startling shift in decorum when we asked the organizers of an event we would have liked to attend about their Covid policies (spoiler: there aren’t any, there won’t be any, and fuck you for asking, thanks).
Navigating a shrinking world that used to be so full is jarring. I am genuinely not sure how I am supposed to continue existing in society as a person with an autoimmune condition, the highest risk category beside the elderly as it stands- at least, until they change that, too. If by some miracle Covid were eradicated in an instant, if the world “went back to normal” tomorrow, I don’t know how I could after seeing the last four years of this. Four years of my world getting smaller and smaller and smaller until it is only me left to wither and blow away, a tickle of an afterthought to tease the damaged brains of all my peers, drifting; huh, wonder whatever happened to her. Who needs enemies when all and sundry are happy to abandon you- no, endanger you- for the mild inconvenience of wearing a piece of cloth? I talk to my old friends and they speak as if I already died; you did this! I want to scream, this is your fault!
but instead I nod and say how I’m doing well, thanks, hope you’re hanging in there too (no I don’t, not really. I hope you get exactly what you deserve). Everyone has gone mad and by the time they feel the effects of it all it will be too late- and a small wonder if I live to see it through, thanks to them.
I try to stay optimistic. It’s a big world, I guess. Perpetual house arrest at the hands of an effectively zombified populace is not exactly fuel for hope, though. I am not happy, but I don’t have sadness in my heart anymore. I barely have love left in me. All I have is anger, and hate. So, so much hate. A brand of hate which will never go away- and I hate that. Hate. HATE.
On some level I understand this, but: I am no different than any one of these people, and if I can do it- if I was somehow able to miraculously break free of this unbreakable propaganda to protect myself and others out of necessity- then they can do it by choice. The only marked difference between me and anyone else is that I don’t get the luxury of braving the invisible unknowns of post-infection everyone seems to believe they can power through. I am then, frankly, very sick of hearing how hard it is to maintain precautions from this perspective. I have negative sympathy for it. I very much do not get it.
I guess I feel different because I was already very political by 2020. I was not as terminally online as I am today, but I knew my way around the internet and I knew how to find things and how to analyze things. What that meant is that it was much easier for me to cut through all the propaganda and misinformation going around.
My friends were completely apolitical. We all grew up in the end of history and they never moved past that extremely apolitical lib perspective. They couldn’t evaluate misinformation and they sure as hell couldn’t cut through official propaganda efforts. I talked to them a bit about things, and I thought I was getting through, but at the end of the day I was just another guy with an opinion. Of course I know I’m right, but to them literally every other person and outlet was saying the opposite of what I was saying, so why should they believe me? I had undergone massive political development slowly over the span of years during a period that was much more stable. What they needed to do was the same thing, but over a couple very chaotic months. It just wasn’t gonna happen.
I think to my autistic brain that is just such a foreign concept to be almost alien; my roommate once said that their opinion of the gen pop changed when they understood most people go through life trying not to think about anything- but I have always thought and thought again and then again about everything my entire life. I am always thinking, observing, learning and absorbing information. That’s why, eventually, Marxism and materialism appealed to me so much later in life, but I don’t think you necessarily need to reach that level of development to come to my conclusions at all. Maybe I am, ironically, giving people too much credit… but I am really nothing special. Everyone is capable of this; but they aren’t receptive at all, in my experience, and I don’t know how to grapple with that. I guess that’s where the dialectical part comes in; despite the very clear decline & depravity I/we see, it somehow still must not be enough, not yet.
I struggle with this as well. Just endless lemmings going about their superficial lives as if nothing matters. And maybe they’re right? I mean, no one is going to remember 99.99999% of us 100 years from now.
Sometimes it makes me wonder if ignorance really is “bliss”?
It is until it isn’t, and by then your hopes are on the godliness of others having survived your bliss coming to save you. Not betting odds I would take on a personal level, let alone societal.