The Revolution Will Not Be Ableist

We'll change the world together, or we won't change it at all

I’m exhausted.

I’m reading yet another long list of justifications for not masking from a self-identified leftist.

The most oft-repeated?

It is what it is, we just have to accept it.

There’s nothing we can do.

It’s just not realistic to eliminate COVID.

Is it realistic to Defund the Police? Is it realistic to end the production of fossil fuels? Is it realistic to bring down an oligarchy? Is it realistic to Abolish ICE?

Was it realistic to fight AIDS? Was it realistic to end segregation?

Is it realistic to burn down every private insurance company and build a world with free, high-quality healthcare on demand for every human in this country?

Is it realistic to stop the military industrial complex and invest billions in social programs instead?

You see where I’m going with this.

We’re leftists! We live and breathe and fight and die and lose and win the unrealistic battles, always!

We’re not moderates. We’re not quiet, accepting, sighing, status quo hugging brunch-going eye rollers who glaze over when we hear big ideas.

We don’t all hold hands at the Centrist Rally chanting “Better Things Aren’t Possible.”

We’re not burned out middle-managers with no greater aspiration than a white picket fence and a 401(k).

We’re not American-flag-pin-wearing-Joe-Biden-loving-Democratic-party-defending liberals who repeat White House Press releases verbatim and take CNN as gospel truth.

We’re the ones who hear the lackluster justifications of smarmy politicians and scream “You’re killing us!” until someone drags us from the room.

We’re the ones who repost the most recent anti-trans NY Times editorial with the caption “How does anyone still believe the garbage they publish??”

We’re the ones who see children locked in cages, and we go get the posterboard, and we go get the markers, and we don’t stop and think “is my poster going to free those children today,” because we’re going to do something, we’ve just got to do something.

We’re the ones who see the violence being carried out by police in our streets, and we march, and we scream, and we rage, and we cry, and we come back and we do it all again the next week.

We’re the ones who were told, as children, “this is just how it is,” and replied, “but that’s not right.”

Our comrades are dying. Our people. Hundreds daily. The majority of them vaccinated. Most of them elderly, immune compromised or disabled. The most vulnerable among us. Those who require the most care.

Thousands are being disabled, all around us, all the time.

And disabled people can’t enter public spaces safely- any of them. Not even some of our organizing spaces. Not even our hospitals.

I understand why many want to look away. I did too. When I first got vaccinated in early 2021, I stopped masking in most situations. I had been told my risk, even of catching COVID, was low. I didn’t know much about Long COVID, if anything. I wanted my old life back, so badly. I went to a dive bar on my birthday that summer and sang with my friend’s band. We dusted off our rendition of the June Carter/ Johnny Cash duet, “Jackson,” and it was just like the BeforeTimes.

“Well go on down to Jackson,” I belted in my costume jewelry with my put-on twang, “go ahead and wreck your health!”

We did whiskey shots. I hugged everybody.

Months later, I was in Argentina. My friend Yesenia and I were staying in a modern apartment in Palermo, with a vertiginous, railway-less staircase I feared to tumble down after too much wine. She told me a new variant had been discovered.

“It has 35 mutations on the spike protein,” Yesenia read to me.

In my memory, I put down the make-up brush I was holding, but perhaps that’s a dramatic embellishment. After all, why would I have been in our bathroom applying blush while Yesenia read to me? She always takes longer getting ready than I do. She puts her music on, loud, and I fumble through the same lightly-altered makeup routine I’ve had since college while she lines and pouts and paints. Sometimes I ask her to do my eyes for me, and she leaves me looking impossibly unlike myself.

But in that moment, whatever I was doing, I remembered something I’d read months earlier. That the vaccine was formulated to imitate the spike protein, and that with any luck the spike protein wouldn’t mutate quickly.

I got a lump in my throat. My mind was racing. I didn’t know then that the Delta variant already had a significant number of mutations on the spike protein. I didn’t know then that Omicron would go on to kill almost 200,000 Americans in under 10 weeks. I didn’t know then that Joe Biden would successfully brand that winter “The Pandemic of the Unvaccinated”. I didn’t know then that 40% of the dead would be vaccinated.

I didn’t know then that unmitigated spread leads to variants, and variants inevitably lead to vaccine resistance.

I put my concerns aside and let our new Argentine friends take us to an underground club nearby, designed to look exactly like a New York City Subway station. My smile in the photos is so wide. I’m brandishing a yellow rose that a man bought me from a passing flower vendor.

We did tequila shots. I hugged everybody.

By the time I got home in mid-December, Omicron was on the move. I decided to lockdown at a close friend’s home for the duration of the wave- which turned out to be over a month. As I bonded with her new baby and learned which ABBA songs, exactly, would calm the baby down (the baby has fantastic taste), I watched the case rates, hospitalization numbers, and death toll with rising horror.

The horror wasn’t only from witnessing a figurative bloodbath. It was also from watching the increasingly dystopian Pandemic is Over No Matter What Messaging in the New York Times and the rest of the major media outlets. As the death toll touched *a 9/11 per day,* it was clear no number of deaths could be billed as bad news for our dear President Biden. The strategy was teflon; no media outlet was going to mention that it was, objectively, a disaster.

My father, who is in his 60s and who at the time had undiagnosed Stage 2 Kidney Cancer, called me and speculated that perhaps, based on what he was reading in the paper, we should all just “go out and get it.” (Thanks to many sessions where I screamed statistics at both of my parents, they have never stopped masking nor contracted COVID).

I’m relating this story to you because I’m hoping it will be more resonant than simply saying “I mask and so should you!” I’m hoping I can describe my own process of coming to terms with something that should never have been hard for me, as a leftist, to believe: that we were being lied to by our government. That we were being forced back into unsafe working conditions. That “the end” of COVID was a political convenience more than it was ever a scientific reality. That the vulnerable, as always, were being left behind.

It’s been a year since my No Good, Very Bad, Omicron COVID Reckoning Winter, a year since I tearfully let go of my fantasy of “back to normal”. It’s been a year during which I centered the voices of those most affected and fell back on my training as a leftist activist.

I ask myself, who do these narratives of Covid “ending” serve?

I ask myself, who is being most harmed by the pandemic?

I ask myself, if not now, when?

I ask myself, if not me, who?

And in that year, a lot of things have changed for me. The first is that I mask indoors with a high-quality mask in public spaces, always. The second is that I began to view COVID not as a temporary inconvenience that I could finally “get over,” but as a fact of life that I needed to learn to live with, safely, and in ways that minimize the harm I do to others.

I dine and have drinks with friends- on porches, patios, rooftops and parks.

I (and my friends) test before seeing people indoors in their homes.

I build community with other COVID activists, writers, and everyone who dares to imagine a better, safer, kinder world with us.

Most crucially, I learn, I work, I research, and I write. I learned that Long Covid is common, and has dangerous physical markers like tiny clots in the blood, cognitive damage, and viral persistence. I learned that, by conservative estimates at the Brookings Institute, there are 16 million Americans currently living with Long COVID- 5% of the country- and that 2-4 million of them are too disabled to work.

I learned that COVID is still the third leading cause of death in the US, as it has been since 2020, trailing only “heart disease” and “all types of cancer combined.” I learned its toll is still not comparable to either the flu or a cold.

I learned that reinfections are common, and that reinfecting everyone continually is a “strategy” that will harm, not only the vulnerable, not only the elderly, not only the disabled, but all of us.

I learned there are technical fixes! Solutions like high quality ventilation and Far UVC! I learned that billionaires know about these options and utilize them.

Most importantly, I learned that COVID elimination is both critical and possible.

There’s been a lot of anger online, but I want to invite anyone who didn’t know any of the above to join the movement to save lives, stop the spread, clean the air, and treat Long COVID. I want to invite all of you to mask up, punch back, and join with us to imagine all the beautiful, unrealistic futures we might have if we only fight for them.

I want to invite you to help us hold Joe Biden and the Democratic Party accountable for breaking their campaign promise to end this pandemic, and instead continuing the violent, eugenicist policies of the Trump administration.

I want you to wear a mask not because I want you to, but because you want to.

I want us to end COVID together because we can.

And I’ll bring the markers. If you bring the posterboard.