This Internet stranger who is immunocompromised and wears a p100 respirator everywhere loves you and is so, so proud of you. Never stop. You are what gives me the strength and hope to keep going. Please keep going, too, as long as it takes.

Covid is spread via water droplets and touch, so additional measures are pretty worthless beyond keeping your door shut.

As a global population I feel like we now inhabit two different worlds, and I do not see how the gap will be bridged. It is terrifying.

There are countries that exist and also aren’t the US of A.

Correct. I was worried that my wording was poor since most who say this are from the US, where any efforts at mitigation were minimal at best, so I apologize. I am not entirely educated on how the rest of the world outside of China and New Zealand handled things for the early pandemic, so I often just presume it was like us: terribly.

I don’t know how to say with grace that I just do not think remote learning is the boogeyman we should point our fingers at, so I will leave it at that.

I don’t believe this. The remote learning thing was, to my knowledge, mandates for something like three months (a summer vacation) at most pretty much everywhere in the country and you’re telling me this completely stunted any part of the growth of children? Not everything else that we continue to subject children to since then? I’m losing my mind and don’t feel like I know how to socialize anymore as an adult who has not been to school in decades because I’m being gaslit by everyone around me 24/7 going on five years and counting. No. Kids are not stupid. We are doing this to them and if remote learning for brief periods of time sporadically through 20-21 has anything to do with it (and I do not believe it does) then it is extremely minimal in comparison to the sheer terror and ongoing psychic charade we have subjected them to daily since 2020.

It was never off the menu. The vaccines are not enough. Please mask.

I actually really quite like this little smiley face. I didn’t know it was part of a bigger, more cynical marketing scheme…though I guess I should expect that. I’m in my 30s but I saw it a lot growing up.

I like that fella on the right. Whimsical creature. A horse is just a horse, of course.

I liked the ones that were like Nintendo Wii fan. Demonoid user. Night elf player. God yeah bring these back

Psychology has nothing to do with 99% of my problems which are external and material. If therapy helps you, that is wonderful. It’s only ever been an obstacle for me on my way to inject my legs with juice my body should have made when it was born. It has not given me comfort nor hope for living in peace in a fascist country ignorant of suffering and community.

My wife’s coworker complained to her recently that she’s gotten sick like twice since she started working there about a month ago and since we are the only people who ever wear masks 100% of the time we are outside of our home we have gotten sick maybe that many times total since 2020. They don’t care.

Surely even Americans would revolt

I like your post but no, they wouldn’t. It is not a matter of simple disillusionment, for USians it’s practically faith. I can’t overstate this. They will kill everyone “lesser” than them before they go after anyone above them, because no one is above them. I don’t believe any revolution will happen here that isn’t purely aimed downward.

Howhave you managed to get by that long? Unemployment caps out at 18 months, at least where I am.

I had a nice savings built up that lasted us about 6 months or so and then unemployment capped for me at 6 months as well, but since then my wife was lucky enough to get a min wage job to cover us; she assured me it’s no trouble and that she’s just repaying me working and supporting us for years on my own but I still feel pretty rotten about it often because I was just sitting at home safely and she’s in crowds of hundreds of people coming and going daily as the only one masking.

We got really, really lucky and found a rent-controlled apartment with a roommate who is just as serious as us about Covid thanks to my connections in our city’s Covid activism Discord, which was a genuine miracle with the timing. I’m not sure what else we would have done otherwise. We have only been surviving, not anywhere near what we had prior to the RTO mandates starting around 22-23, and I am very bitter about it. I’m already at a disadvantage for being a woman in tech, and this shit definitely doesn’t help. I don’t need to be in a building full of sick assholes who will kill me because I’m immunocompromised; guess what else employers discriminate against?

So I agree, I hope they all leave this earth violently. If they keep this up maybe I’ll get my wish.

This is what has kept me unemployed for almost two years. I’ve been a software dev for almost 15 years and I can’t get hired now because I must love the office, worship the office, schmooze at the office. No. Fuck the office. We did it before and we can keep doing it.

Fun story, pre-Covid I tried to be remote only like some of my other coworkers because of my medical needs which are much better managed at home and I was told no. then a year later Covid happened and we all went remote anyway. Almost like we don’t actually need to be in an office to do stupid fucking office jobs!! Wow!!!

Truly.

Like they just refuse to understand the initial premise of masking - that it was to protect others from you first.

Not only do they do it for half-assed reasons in the first place (“you do you, except you keep your sick away from me”), they half-ass it in action by wearing the most ineffectual masks that are not adequate to prevent aerial spread, and then they pull them under their chins to talk or eat and wear them under their noses all the time like you said! That last one is actually mind blowing to me, I will never, ever understand it. At that point I don’t even know what it’s for. Is it virtue signalling? To whom? No one wears masks anymore, and in lots of places they’ll sneer at you for it. So whatever reason they do it, if they do it and they can feel the air go in and out of their face holes when they breathe then certainly, certainly they know this isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing even a little bit, right…? Do they think at all?

In the before-times no staff anywhere, at least that I knew, would ever have refused to wear a mask for a patient request. It is absurd how blatantly politicized this genuinely unprecedented virus is to where all social norms are essentially evaporating to a collective trauma around… a few weeks of very lenient stay-home policies in some places, I guess. We’re so cooked lol

Thank you. I wanted to say something similar but didn’t have the numbers readily on me, and call this a hunch but I suspect you’ll want to have any citations handy for the rest of the stats that are unrelated to the CDC survey.

Man fuck you. You don’t deserve to use these words. Let me tell you a little something about direct action and what participation in a struggle of liberation looks like.

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.

But go on and fucking tell me what Fred Hampton and Ho Chi Minh think, bitch. You want me to be optimistic about this? Tell me what the fuck you’ve done!