I really want Left organizations to rethink "back to normal" in the pandemicine.
I can't tell you how demoralizing it is to see announcements of meetings or other events that I might want to go to, but for which I see no information about Covid precautions. Is it virtual? or hybrid? Will people be wearing respirators? What's the ventilation like in that indoor venue? Are we living on separate planets?
Nate Holdren, writing recently in Peste Magazine, has described this feeling as "Broken Sociality":
"Experiences of community are offered but not actually present, in that they're present only via serious risks which are often un- or under-acknowledged." Holdren calls this "social loneliness," because it means "reduced time doing things and seeing people compared to pre-pandemic -- because fewer places are doing anything (let alone enough) to mitigate covid exposure" and it can also mean feeling alone in a crowd because one is the only person wearing a respirator.
This "social loneliness," Holdren notes, "blurs into another facet of broken sociality.
. . political loneliness. This is the sense of a gulf in values or in
understanding of some very important aspects of the world. Knowing that the [supposed]
return to normal means even more dying and life-altering suffering is terrible.
Knowing that many people seem not to realize this, that people in officially
respected positions seem to find this acceptable, that fellow travelers on the
left don’t treat this as a priority, that all feels isolating to a degree I
find hard to overstate."
As Holdren notes, this affective experience is of course less awful than the "suffering, inequality, disablement, and death" that the "pseudo-return" to normal is creating.
But it's not unrelated, and it all bodes ill for our collective future.
I have harped on some of these concerns before, and I still find it demoralizing to see announcements of supposedly progressive meetings or events that show not a bit of concern about the continuing social murder.
But as Holdren notes, it would be wrong to hold any of this
against the powerless folks just trying to make it though. The problem lies with the ruling class--capitalist,
government, and mainstream media--who have been trying to enforce back to normal
for years now.
But despite that sociological construction of the end of the pandemic emergency, the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic has of course not really ended. Covid is still killing hundreds of people each day in the US, and debilitating and disabling even more.
Wastewater levels--one of the only reliable measures of transmission still available now that tests are less available, less accurate, and less reported--have since last summer remained persistently higher than they were any time before the January '22 Omicron wave. Although vaccines have massively reduced the death toll during the initial, acute phase of illness, their efficacy wanes in a few months, and even at their best they do relatively little to reduce transmission, long covid, or other health impacts.
And the long term damage for survivors can be severe. The CDC acknowledges that about 20% of those infected get long covid, and other estimates are much higher. Even among the asymptomatic, each infection increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, brain damage, diabetes, and other bodily damage. The virus seems to increase the risk and progression of cancer. It impairs the immune system, making people more vulnerable to other illnesses.
Moreover, each transmission increases the chances for the virus to mutate again and potentially to become more harmful--it has already become more immune resistant and undermined previously useful treatments like Evusheld and monoclonal antibodies--and there is no indication the virus is getting milder, despite a common myth about how viruses tend to evolve.
We can also note that the impact of the pandemic
disproportionately harms workers and poor people and people of color and incarcerated people and of course the swelling ranks of people with disabilities.
Some of groups have, unsurprisingly, been among the most thoughtful about maintaining precautions.
Here in Portland, for instance, The Cascade Festival of African Films offered opportunities for viewing films online--which also came in handy during the late February snowstorms.
Disability justice groups have created helpful guides to planning events with an eye to inclusion as well as to crip survival. Pandemic research for the people has a primer on mutual aid inthe pandemic. And the Death Panel Podcast has two episodes about organizing and Covid.
So, here are some tips on Practicing Inclusion in the Time of COVID from the group Strategies for High Impact.
When your group organizes a meeting or other event, think about how to make it genuinely inclusive. Think about how welcoming it might be, or not, to those who can't afford to take time off from work if they get sick, or how welcoming it is to those who are immune-suppressed, or immune-compromised, or already suffering Long Covid, or otherwise debilitated or disabled, or who have family members who are.
And if you really want to welcome those folks, then ask yourself and your fellow organizers, Can we hold our gathering online? If not, how about providing, wearing, and requiring KN95 masks or N95 respirators? (Because yes, respirators do work!)
How about having a hybrid meeting option? How about meeting outdoors or creating more airflow indoors?
If you are using an indoor venue, can you find out what the ventilation is like? Can the owners or managers of the space tell you how many air changes per hour the HVAC system provides? Can you test the space to see what the Carbon Dioxide levels are like when it's filled with people? Can you build DIY air filters to help clear the air?
When you annouce your meeting or event, let people know what kinds of precautions are in place. Show that you've thought about it. And plan ahead to follow through.
What are you willing to do as a group to protect people from COVID exposure? How can you ensure that agreed-upon practices will be followed?
So let's do what we can to mitigate the harms of a failed or failing system of public health, to build solidarity, and to keep ourselves, our allies, our accomplices, and our movements as strong and sharp as possible for the long struggle ahead.
See also:
Able-bodied leftists cannot abandon disabled solidarity to move on from covid
Why has the left deproritized covid?
The revolution will not be ableist
Disability justice organizers dream big and resist a culture of disposability
