They’ve left us to die but we need to fight, not despair
We need to clear our minds of “brain smoke!” And More!
Silence. They want us to be silent.
-- Conor Browne
Welcome to the 15th issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter! I’d like to thank you all for your time and attention over these last few months. At this point, we’re getting somewhat over 500 views per issue fairly consistently with about 320 subscribers. Please feel free to spread the word about the newsletter.
And speaking of subscribers, I have no intention of implementing paid subscriptions for the newsletter. It will remain free for the foreseeable future. A few of you have pledged purchase a paid subscription if I ever do activate that option, and I want you all to know how much I appreciate you for that show of support.
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The mini-theme for this issue is basically resiliency. Not the cheesy, dishonest and exploitative corporate “wellness” resiliency, but the serious vocation of warding off despair and doing useful work in a world that really seems to have lost its way. Being Covid-aware, advocating for clean indoor air and mask mandates in healthcare settings, continuing to take precautions for our own and others’ safety -- this is all sticking-out-like-a-sore-thumb-tall-poppy work, and not in a good way. Doing that work wears us all down.
I hope today’s readings will provide some inspiration, ideas and strategies and help make that burden a little lighter.
As a reward for anyone resilient enough to get to the end of the list…a song I’ve always found very uplifting and inspirational!
Now More Than Ever, We Need to Fight, Not Despair by Gregg Gonsalves / The Nation
Which brings me back to despair. Everything I just mentioned—the continued death toll, the official indifference, the expectation that there is nothing to be done but to get used to it all—is a reason to feel helpless. But where then does this leave us? If we give in to despair, we allow the people in power, the ones who want us dispirited and defeated, to declare victory—and at that point, whatever chance we have of creating a better world is snuffed out. That is surrender.
What can we do? In their book with Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds, Berlant suggests a kind of solidarity: “Then there are the people, my peeps, who turn their faces to the world to say this and make that because what they see is what they have to give.” What they see is what they have to give. At the very least, we bear witness. We speak out when we are mocked, threatened, discouraged, knowing many cannot speak, including the over 1 million dead in the United States, those who have always been hardest hit by “slow death” in America, Black and brown people, the queer, the poor.
And if we can do more, we do that too, not expecting victory, because this has always been about struggle, about persisting, about “refusing to be worn out.” Astra Taylor, at the end of her book Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, suggests that instead of embracing the cruel optimism of a better world waiting at the end of the road, we’ve got to realize that democracy is always in the making, and that it is not a “predictable or stable enterprise.” She suggests, “instead of founding fathers let us be perennial midwives, helping always to deliver democracy anew.”
Speak. Organize. Fight. This is so much better than despair.
Yes, They've Left You to Die. by Jessica Wildfire / OK Doomer
We don’t have any friends in government anymore. They’re working overtime to dismantle what’s left of our social safety nets. They’re kicking everyone off Medicaid and food stamps. Democrats consider it a major victory just to protect our basic benefits a little longer.
Republicans are willing to hold us all hostage, just so they can leave a few more people to die. Their Covid policies decimated our workforce, and now they’re making it legal to hire children. They want them to work dangerous jobs, and they’re lying about it through their teeth.
Do you know what pharmaceutical companies talk about? They wonder if it’s more profitable to keep you sick.
Nobody is really watching our back.
The super rich have abandoned us. That doesn’t mean we have to abandon each other. We can look out for each other. We can clean the air. We can wear N95 masks. We can make schools safe. We can adapt to climate change. We can stop letting billionaires divide us. We can take care of each other.
Yes, they’ve left you to die.
We haven’t.
You're Not a Fearmonger. You're an Orchid. You Have Sentinel Intelligence. by Jessica Wildfire / OK Doomer
Americans and Westerners in general are suffering from a pandemic of denial, wishful thinking, and toxic positivity. It impedes us at every turn, on almost every serious issue. It exacerbates our existing anxiety and contributes to our sense of despair about the future of the planet. Here’s the thing:
You’re not a fearmonger. You’re an orchid.
You have sentinel intelligence.
Sentinel intelligence refers to a special cognitive ability that allows someone to detect threats before anyone else. Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy talk about this trait in their book, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. They review a number of natural and economic disasters throughout history. As they write, “in each instance a Cassandra was pounding the table and warning us precisely about the disasters that came as promised.” Not only were they ignored, but “the people with the power to respond often put more effort into discounting the Cassandra than saving lives and resources.” It just keeps happening.
You can probably relate.
If you have sentinel intelligence, your brain can aggregate and sift through extraordinary amounts of information in a very short period of time, especially when it comes to seeing latent or hidden dangers. You don’t get stymied by what Clarke and Eddy call the “magnitude of overload.”
How to Clear Our Minds of ‘Brain Smoke’ by Crawford Kilian Yesterday / The Tyee
Brain-smoked or not, our governments know that even paying lip service to climate change can be hazardous: the current wildfires also made the hashtag #ClimateScam trend on Twitter. And not all the shitposters are bots. Some of them vote.
Shitposting is itself a displacement activity, a way to avoid coming to terms with reality. Accepting reality, after all, would mean accepting — and implementing — major changes in the way we live. Some of us, evidently, would rather die.
Let’s hope that when the smoke clears, so will our minds. Instead of pretending that the threat is over, as many of us still do about COVID-19, we should take these late-spring wildfires as warning shots of far greater fires in our near future.
As we fight the Alberta and B.C. wildfires, we must also plan for future disasters by Sara Shneiderman and Jonathan Eaton / The Conversation
Research and life experience tells us that, as humans, we are good at focusing on immediate needs while pushing longer-term processes down the priority list until they gain urgency.
We tend to follow the same patterns when facing disasters. We are good at focusing on things that are on fire now, while being unable or unwilling to take on the long-term tasks that will keep other disasters from occurring in the first place. Studies in behavioural economics call this tendency to place a higher value on the current time “present bias.”
When applied to disaster planning, this means future preparedness and mitigation activities can face an uphill battle, even though spending slightly more in the present, for instance in constructing earthquake-safe buildings, may result in large future benefits.
These effects of present bias are a dilemma for disaster planning, as the vast majority of societal attention and resources are dedicated to moments in crisis, rather than to preventing crises.
After N.B.'s deadliest year, COVID-related strokes and heart attacks are in the spotlight by Robert Jones / CBC News
Colin Furness is an infection control epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto who has tracked the pandemic's progress in New Brunswick since 2020.
In an interview with CBC:Shift earlier this month, Furness said COVID deaths and infections alone won't reflect the true extent of the damage the virus can cause.
It is a "very 2020, 2021 way to look at this pandemic" said Furness.
Researchers have documented since 2020 that COVID causes vascular damage in some infected people and Furness contends provinces like New Brunswick need to study vascular-related deaths more closely, not just COVID deaths, to understand the virus's full body count.
"We should actually not be looking at (COVID) deaths per week," said Furness.
"We should be looking at changes in population life expectancy. We should be looking at rates of heart attack and stroke."…
Housing insecurity and rough living, mental illness and addiction issues are also additional non-COVID suspects for the increase in fatalities but Furness believes most will inevitably be found to be COVID-related — and the sooner that is understood the better.
"There's a lot of effort to attribute it to something other than COVID but without success," he said of elevated death counts all over North America.
"We kind of have a big question mark around why are we seeing more stroke and heart attack deaths and so those are the kinds of numbers I think we should be looking at."
Covid silence and how the media works by Nate Bear / Do Not Panic
But over time, and especially as the vaccines began to be rolled out, the messaging from political offices and the media shifted explicitly and implicitly - the emergency is over and it’s time to get back to normal. It would have gone something like this: The press officers for No.10 or the White House or any head of state office would have called (or had lunches or dinners) with editors to talk about the need to move away from the emergency framing to transition back to normal. I suspect country leaders themselves would have talked to newspaper owners about the need for normal. And these political offices and leaders will have been making this push to media off the back of their own conversations with business about the need to get back to normal. The push to return to a pre-pandemic mode will have been coordinated between the highest political and media offices, with business CEOs well in the mix, if not the originating node, of this push. And it was hegemonic, with all in agreement. I suspect the only major points of tension were public health agencies and political offices of health who may not have been so keen to get back to normal so quickly (but of course were never brave enough to say anything).
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the ruling class’ return to Social Darwinism by Evan Blake / World Socialist Web Site
It must be stressed that there is nothing comparable to this scale of mass debilitation in human history. Yet this immense danger goes almost entirely unmentioned in the corporate media.
The pandemic has irreversibly changed global society, leaving behind social scars and emotional trauma for billions of people internationally. But the capitalist ruling elites are totally indifferent to this suffering of the population.
In January, speaking at a conference of city mayors, Biden made an offhand comment on the COVID death toll in the US, stating bluntly, “I sometimes underestimate it because I stopped thinking about it.”
What contempt for the families and loved ones of the over 1.1 million Americans who have died of COVID!
Mask mandates save lives by Niels-Jakob H. Hanse, Rui C. Mano / Journal of Health Economic
Our results imply that statewide mask mandates saved 87,000 lives through December 19, 2020, while an additional 57,000 lives could have been saved in the same period if a nationwide mandate had been enacted starting in April 2020. Both numbers are chiefly driven by the estimated effects of mask mandates in urban Democratic-leaning counties. Lives saved by mask mandates are concentrated in urban Democratic-leaning counties in states that imposed mandates, while lives that could have been saved are concentrated in urban Democratic-leaning counties in states without mask mandates. The magnitude of these effects is large. For comparison, COVID-19 deaths in the same period amounted to around 309,000 in the United States.
“Sometimes it all falls apart, and it tears up your heart, and you feel like you’ve got nowhere to go … Well, if you only knew that the sun does shine for you, soon it’s going to feel like the whole world is brand new. You’re gonna rise up, this I promise you.”
Tia Brazda and Shine!