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’m one of those people that really enjoyed the lockdown but was terrified of dying.

Wish we could bring the lockdown back, honestly.

We lost more people to covid than ww2. No one will acknowledge or care about trauma unless it is profitable. This is America.

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.

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!!!

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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.

no spectacle, no liberal attention

Earlier this year we had COVID rip through our unit, half of our residents got it. Since it’s a dementia unit it’s nigh impossible to quarantine people because they either will come walking out and get aggressive if you try to keep them inside, or they’ll find a way to fall. While most made it through the quarantine period, it still took its toll, we had 6 die within a few days of each other a bit after we were fully cleared on the unit, they just weren’t able to make back out on the other side. To that end, there are a fair few people that now have chronic coughs and we had RSV hit a few weeks later. The ones that died were already pretty precarious but as of now we have a new group that’s a bit more precarious and keeps getting sick.