Logging back in from my break — hell of a time to return — just to to tell you this is very felt. I see your posts in the disability community mega. I never liked the “its just online, u can log off” rhetoric because, yeah, you sure can, and I do, but niche forums like this are (usually) more than some meaningless input-output feedback loop and whether we like it or not this is a space of human beings with lives and names we can recognize and that is called socializing, wow! I similarly do not have many means to “touch grass” because the grass touchers keep making the air toxic and doing nothing about it while telling me I’m the fucked up one. Whenever people say this (call me uncharitable, idgaf) I assume they haven’t thought about COVID at all since '21 just like everybody else in the backwards goddamn world we live in now and that tells me all I need to know about who I ought to listen to. This old post I made sums up the “just organize” mentality, a thing I have done & attempted much more and for far longer than most here have even been “leftist”:

My wife works in this little crappy Chuck E Cheese knockoff arcade downtown- pretty much the worst place to be all things considered, but we don’t have any other choice for income and it pays well enough of any minimum wage job we’ve ever had. She’s been there for a year and has never once taken off her N95 indoors or around other people for any of her eight hour shifts (and her combined three hour commute to and from the building). She has been the only one to do so. When she describes to her coworkers, the wonderful working class of the United States, that she does it to protect me, an immunocompromised person in her family, and when she describes the dangers, shows them the data we have surrounding current Covid trends, they will all say “yeah wow that’s bad”- and then we offer them a mask from our personal supply of N95s and they go “no thanks” without hesitation, every time. They have mandatory “safety meetings” every few months and we’ve brought Covid and masking up at every one of them in addition to casual conversations with her coworkers. There is no plan to change policy. There is no plan for them to bother themselves for the sake of others, or even themselves, at any level of the social ladder, institutional or interpersonal. One of her coworkers talked about driving to Seattle a few weeks ago for a concert with someone who tested positive for Covid, but that they weren’t worried because “it was probably a false positive”. One of her coworkers complains that she started a couple weeks ago and has been sick twice. My wife has been sick that much the entire year she’s worked there, because she wears a high-quality and well-fitting respirator at all times.

Last year we wanted to go to an event nearby and asked the organizers of what was planned to be about 40-50 people if they would require masks because I was an immunocompromised person and wanted the best chances to avoid infection as much as possible while still being able to participate. In their messages they sounded sympathetic, assuring me that they would and that those who saw what I said would wear them for me that weekend. We were two of maybe four people in masks there. They didn’t do anything for us, and people who said they would mask were not wearing them. So we left.

sure wish I could go volunteer at my Communist Org For Building Communism like you and all your badass friends, except they (and probably you too removed) are all carrying airborne death and won’t do anything about it. Fuck you.

So, like, yeah, it is just a website. But the real world has fucking abandoned me, and us, and at least I can say Hexbear was a spot where I didn’t have to listen to anyone talking about COVID who would also pearl clutch about presinald trunt, or any number of other inane liberal bugbears, if they talk about it at all. It’s at the very least a sanity check in times that are simply incomprehensible.