Whenever people and the mainstream media talk about "The trauma of COVID" they always mean the lockdowns and not the... you know... millions of deaths.
Well I have trauma about the deaths. I have trauma about the way our society was manipulated into sacrificing a huge chunk of the population with a smile and a wave, and how we just don't talk about it.
This same society still expects you to be horrified by the violence of 9/11 or whatever when the US alone was experiencing a 9/11 level of death every day and the disease is still killing, we just don't bother recording the spread anymore. What the fuck is wrong with people?!
I literally get (for lack of a better word) triggered when people talk about how hard it was to have to have to wear a mask or to not get a haircut or some selfish bullshit. Or when they act as though their kids remote learning for a while ruined them or something. It's all so petty. They just don't give a shit. They'd kill millions for a haircut. It makes my heart sink, my eyes glaze and I start dissociating.
Imagine if this was the blitzkrieg, and instead of going to bomb shelters people were just like "I'm sick of hearing about these bombings, I'm just going to pretend they're not happening and leave it up to fate." And then the bomb shelters are all closed and even the people who still wanted to take shelter are left to fend for themselves. What madness would have that been if they had done that during WW2? Dragging people into the street to be bombed?
I don't care if you were sick of lockdowns or restrictions! Fighting a pandemic should have been like fighting a war, we should have been doing everything we could to survive!
I am scared of these people. These brainwashed puppets. These eugenicists. If they can do this, well... it makes me feel surrounded by monsters. Like I can't trust anyone.
Imagine if this was the blitzkrieg, and instead of going to bomb shelters people were just like "I'm sick of hearing about these bombings, I'm just going to pretend they're not happening and leave it up to fate." And then the bomb shelters are all closed and even the people who still wanted to take shelter are left to fend for themselves.
And the people who try to take shelter or talk about all the bombings are told that they should seek therapy for their uncontrolled and unreasonable anxiety.
I am so tired of people implying I am cowardly because I actually want to eradicate the virus. It's so backwards.
I find the faux-concern "it's understandable that you're so traumatized, but have you thought about getting help to get past your PTSD?" shit even more infuriating than outright accusations of cowardice.
I'm one of those people that really enjoyed the lockdown but was terrified of dying.
Wish we could bring the lockdown back, honestly.
I am right there with you. While I understand that my experience of lockdown was comparatively comfortable because of my privileges living in the imperial core, I often find myself wishing for lockdown again. Mostly because I hate the virus with all my heart. But also because I want to feel connected to the world again. Lockdown brought out so much beauty of human beings. The earth itself got a reprieve from our consumption. I refuse to believe people simply got tired of being kind and uplifting. That was taken from us like so many beautify things that fail to turn a profit.
It could be possible if we got our shit together and had real planning. The army could be mobilised in hazmat suits to provide public services during lockdowns if they really wanted. Sanitation points could be set up. Planners employed to manage it in the best way. Food and supply deliveries. Inform people why these things are nessisary and emphasise how fucking serious this situation is. Arrest and shame people who don't take it seriously like the selfish murderers they are. Bring the best minds together and fucking devise an efficient method to make it work.
If taken seriously it could be eradicated in a year or two.
I refuse to believe same society that landed on the moon over 50 years ago can't eradicate a virus.
I'm not sure Zero Covid was as far as China was willing to go. Keep in mind it made little sense for China to go all in on eradicating COVID if everyone else was gonna play plague rat.
If the world had been on board the result might have looked very different.
We are never going to eradicate it with current science. This is an airborne, highly contagious, and sometimes asymptomatic virus. Once it spread to the general population, it was
grumbles furiously
Even more reason to hate that they let it spread
It was over before it began. Yes, millions of people died due to mismanagement, but once it took root there was no stopping it from becoming endemic globally.
We don’t even need hazmat suits, just for everyone to agree to wear n95s. We got lucky with the severity of this virus. Imagine if it was the Spanish flu again, or something worse.
We lost more people to covid than ww2. No one will acknowledge or care about trauma unless it is profitable. This is America.
Raw, although covid is still putting up numbers so we will see. could be both
that's meaningless, you have to describe death tolls in terms of 9/11s per capita.
- Show:(
and this is just official deaths due to covid in the usa
I'm not accounting for the excess deaths that the usa numbers ignore
I still think about that time I had to get X-rays at the hospital, and I saw someone die in a shipping container in the parking lot that was turned into a makeshift hospital room, because the hospital was already at maximum capacity. The poor paramedics/EMS workers outside looked defeated in a way that I can't describe.
i lost a lot of respect for the established community organizations, broader public institutions, and the local small business tyrant community that all went mask off.
in a lot of ways, the powers have me on a chain and they yanked it to let me and others know that we are a resource to be sacrificed when the elites need treats. i guess i should say they reminded me, because i already knew this in the back of my mind and had been passively trying to arrange my life so i could have some buffer space. so really, i'm just more motivated to get into a different situation. i had grown somewhat complacent and had allowed myself to believe we could reform our way out of this reactionary hellscape.
covid has been a bleak reminder that our institutions will not save us and that they are adversarial to our goals. we must find our allies, build dual power / mutual aid networks based on immediate material needs. specifically, i have become far more antagonistic to the commodification of third places and actively boycott them while offering no-cost alternatives. my goal in life is to get to a point where i have a place to offer simple and nutritious free meals and space to a broader community of workers, a safe space for them to organize and learn, or even just revel in comradery. i haven't really figured it out yet, so far i'm just working on being efficient in the kitchen and adaptive organizational strategies that can scale but don't need to, and really only with my spare time/energy. pretty sure the key is going to be to make things that are simple and affordable (for me) but delicious and nutritious. it might just be a thing i am only able to do if i reach retirement or only offer to neighbors, coworkers, and family, but i would still find it fulfilling.
anyway, i don't have any answers. i spiraled for a while over the last years as i came to understand the institutional covid response (hypernormalization!), but now i'm trying to acknowledge the steps i've taken to realign myself since and stay focused on what is within my power. like hey, this site, right? we're off the corporate social media sphere sharing memes that would be banned. i'm also much more on-top of my vaccine booster schedule for flu, etc and even got my titres for all the common vax scheduling. and i've passed along relevant info to help others do the same (even under the most shitty ACA or private plan in the US, all vaccines on the schedule, including the titre tests to confirm antibodies are 100% covered by insurance with no copay... you just gotta ask).
I'm just going to pretend they're not happening and leave it up to fate.
It's also incredible how indifferent a lot of people seem to be about their own possible deaths. Healthy society under capital, where you accept the risk of death or disability, because at least then you don't have to go to work tomorrow.
I'd argue it's more a sense of invincibility, one that many lost when they started dying of covid (others though still advised people not to take the shot even as they're dying)
Whenever people and the mainstream media talk about "The trauma of COVID" they always mean the lockdowns and not the... you know... millions of deaths.
WHAT FUCKING LOCKDOWNS!?!?!?!?
I WISH THERE HAD BEEN LOCKDOWNS!!!!
Half-measure lockdowns that had all the downsides of lockdowns while having none of the upsides
Thank you for saying the silenced part out loud, it's part of why I come here. I'm at a loss as to what to contribute, all I know is that I'm doing the best I can and I'm the only one I know who hasn't gotten it yet and who is still taking precautions. And I'm right there with you about trusting people, it has become Russian roulette in terms of covid, as least in my experience. Just knowing there are others out there experiencing this makes me feel a bittersweet pang. I'm glad there are others but I wish we weren't forced into this madness. Hugs, comrade <3
It is scary, its just like. How could they pretend that like nothing just happened? Like morgues being full that like freezer trucks have to be used. My mom worked in a part of healthcare. She saw what happened before dying last year from other stuff. Meanwhile like, my siblings? They downplay covid, refusing to even get vaccinated, and just like... It angers me. Especially since like my mom saw what covid did, and my mom tried encouraging my siblings to get vaccinated and take it seriously. But they just dismissed her after like the stuff she's seen. She also caught covid herself to a few times to and it got bad at a few points.
and I just don't know how. How do people ignore all this stuff or pretend like nothing happened?
Covid def left me psychically wounded in a way that I don't know if I'll ever fully recover from. I wrote a whole damn book to help myself deal with it and tbh the ENTIRE THING spawned from reading about how ants deal with pathogens by systematically cleaning each other every day to keep their population as resistant to infection as possible. By INSTINCT they showcase "we're only as healthy as everyone is." We are social creatures too, we form societies too, we divide up our labor too, how the fuck did we get so alienated from something as basic as "keep each other healthy?"
I had this terror at my core for a while during the pandemic, this emptiness that comes from seeing an animal with some horrific prion disease die in pointless agony. It was like my community, my species, my social superorganism, was looking at pieces of itself turning black and rotting off and just watching in resignation.
All those families collapsed, all those futures forever marked, all that meat offered up to mankind's true predators that lurk in the microscopic margins, and somehow our incredible superorganism recovers, so that it can torture itself again later.
It make me feel insane to think about all the dead, it builds this feverish pressure in my head, like my psyche is bubbling with noxious mud that engulfs my ability to act or focus on anything else
covid broke me. i constantly am grappling with how many people have left us since 2020. how they should still be here. how many more we will lose. the rest of us that very well could suffer from a shorter, needlessly challenging life. all because a small group of selfish removed couldn't sacrifice a month or two in quarantine.
maybe they just didn't understand the risk. for someone not informed i could see them brushing it off. i'm not sure who to blame exactly. i dont understand enough about humanity and the world to say definitively. was it the high priests of capital? the social fascists that refused to cancel their fancy parties? what about the fundamentalists that believe covid is a sign of the impending end of the world and thus hastened it forward? or is it me, who after spending the last 3 years avoiding covid, got infected because i just had to go see that show?
outside of a miracle cure and effective treatment for long covid, i have a hard time seeing things improving for humanity in my lifetime. anyone who has foresight seems to be on the same page. all talking about it does seem to do is depress the people around me - even those i know who agree. society seems to be warping and distorting rapidly to the point where i believe the average human life could become completely and unrecognizably cruel within a generation or two.
i'm not sure who to blame exactly.
Those in positions of power (the super wealthy and the politicians they control). They have the responsibility to be informed and have a plan set up in waiting for events like this. They had been warned for decades by scientists that this would happen. Hell, I have a biology textbook from ten years ago talking about the inevitablity of a devistating pandmec and the steps that could be taken to prevent it.
Much like climate change, they knew the risks but chose greed. They purposefully muddied public opinion and responded weakly to the threat because they never intended to stop it. They decided millions dead was cheaper for them.
It was premeditated, homocidal negligence.
It's what happens when you have a society completely set up around serving capital instead of people.
The virus isn't unable to be eradicated. That's what those in power want you to believe because they don't want to try. They care more about money and power than the lives of "commoners" and much like climate change, they think "Let the poor die! It won't happen to me, I'm special and I have money to protect me."
there's others but bill gates and angela merkel were some of the biggest individual blockers of a TRIPS wavier and the variants that mutated while "the west" was vaccinating its own could've been avoided if it wasn't for muh patents.
I remember where the discourse that started to erode solidarity started from. It was the bourge. Those first few scary months were humanity in display, but we weren't allowed that for long.
It was media showing everyone how the rich kept skiing in Austria and brought the virus home for the poorer folks to catch and die from.
It was business owners and capitalist panicing about the line not going up when they noticed people find life good without all that consumption or travel.
It was a building of divides and eroding of solidarity.
It was "experts" chiming in on how "lockdowds will cause harm to kids" or other similar things. It was seeding distrust to common sense solutions, endless discussion and debate without action.
It was neoliberalism as an ideology.
i have a hard time seeing things improving for humanity in my lifetime.
That’s pretty much the only time we have with climate catastrophe happening. At this point I can really only believe China will lead the rest of the world to a reasonable survival as we continue to rot, because otherwise we have nothing.
You would think trucks carrying away dead bodies was spectical enough for them.
or the mass graves. but that was all too long ago for them to remember now.
Never forget 9/11, never remember those who died from COVID. It's fucked up.
I do the whole :internally-screaming: thing a lot. Like just full on rage yelling monologues where my face contorts and I get myself into a mood and need to calm down. I'm very worried it's gonna slip out one day and lose the last few friends I have or get me kicked out of my family I live with.
And yeah, I totally think about world wars and the shit that they went through for years and then everybody around us threw away the lives of millions and are cutting their own short because they wanted to go to Olive Garden and fucking Disney World.
I'd never been reduced to hissing, spitting, and howling rage until the pandemic and how our 'betters' 'handled' it tbh. I genuinely don't know how I manage to mask in front of people anymore either. Like, I 'joke' about Jokerfication all the time but god help me I think it's happening
I feel ya. I was "fortunate" enough that my inner rage at the system, the rest of my family, and reality was really cultivated while acting as caregiver for my grandparents in their final years which culminated to its, unrelated to covid, conclusion in early April of 2020. And then I never really got to grieve, but there was a brief respite, because there was a month where I hoped that maybe the right thing was gonna happen... and then florida went out of lockdowns and Disney was open in July. It's just been screaming ever since. It's exhausting.
Also, I strongly suspect the people around me are losing their fucking minds.
respect
