I've been reflecting a bit more on the idea that COVID-aware communities are "cult-like" over the past couple of days. as someone who both helps run a COVID-cautious space, and who's often been openly critical of certain aspects of COVID-cautious spaces - specifically for how they tend to launder pseudoscience and enable obsessive-compulsive behaviors under the guise of precautionary principles - I feel like I'm pretty well positioned to speak on the subject.
minimizers often talk about how people taking COVID precautions are channeling our trauma from lockdown into wholly unnecessary levels of caution. and while that doubtless is the case for some individuals, the vast majority of us are simply seeing the mounting evidence that COVID isn't "over" or "just a cold" and acting accordingly.
and the fact is, seldom is that level of scrutiny turned on its head.
after all, why is it that COVID-aware communities are seen as collections of people wallowing in trauma, all while minimizers' rapid shift to memory-holing the pandemic and refusing to hear evidence otherwise is viewed as completely normal?
why is it that COVID-aware individuals are constantly scrutinized for being unable to move beyond 2020, while minimizers' rush to turn back the clock to 2019 is simply taken as a given?
why have the liberals and leftists who shamed conservatives refusing to mask through 2020 and 2021, and who abruptly about-faced to shaming others for continuing to mask once Joe Biden and others in power declared the pandemic "over" against all evidence to the contrary, never faced questioning?
why are COVID-aware people - people who continue to treat COVID like the mass-disabling, airborne, highly contagious pandemic that it is - facing all of the questioning?
examine these conundrums for any significant period of time, and what you'll happen upon is the unavoidable fact that we're all traumatized from the pandemic. our lives all across the world were upended in a frighteningly short period of time, and there's no coming back from that sort of catastrophic shake-up.
some of us are processing that trauma through internalizing the propaganda that COVID is just a cold, ignoring the evidence that it's primarily a cardiovascular disease, ignoring the evidence that vaccines aren't an absolute barrier against long COVID, ignoring their friends and family and co-workers who continue to disappear as they succumb to MECFS, ignoring their own growing brain fog and health issues stemming from repeated infections.
others are treating that trauma as ongoing - as something that never truly went away - and are acting accordingly. we're pushing disability justice to the forefront of our shared consciousness. we're taking steps to help others protect themselves and those around them. and we're making communities of our own - places where we can exist safely, and where we don't have to bend ourselves around the feelings of people unwilling to acknowledge the uncomfortable realities that we're facing head-on.
in other words, we're processing the pandemic by doing something about it - the only constructive things we can do, given the unfortunate fact that everyone with institutional power has effectively abandoned us - rather than by pretending it doesn't exist and doing nothing.
inevitably, the organizing and communities borne from this approach will tend to be isolated and insular. and the reason for that is because we have little other choice. when other COVID-aware people are the only remaining folks still committed to "we keep us safe," then we'll inevitably congregate together to meet our collective social and organizing needs.
that doesn't make us a cult. it makes us people brought together by necessity.
because the rest of you have abandoned us in favor of living in a comfortable shared fiction.
