I'm sorry if I sound like one of "those" people who is stopping people from having fun, but there is no way you are going to convince me that the hundreds of thousands of fans gathered for NFL and college football games are all vaxxed and not risking further mutation. I get that it's outside, but again, these people are shoulder to shoulder, maskless, yelling for 2+ hours, going to and from the bathroom, etc. I just really don't understand how the script has flipped so abruptly from "an outside gathering of tens of thousands of people is definitely a super spreader event" to "nahh it's OK because people are outside."
So it seems like we're back to business as usual, and I won't be surprised if we see another mutation. Or who knows, maybe this thing will just fizzle out.
the exec order for a vaccine mandate took me by surprise, because otherwise almost every institution I deal with has seemed to have fully embraced "Mission: Accomplished" officially.
aside from that, there is a sharp unease rumbling among the workers I speak to directly of public facing institutions. union reps, worker organizations, non profit service providers, healthcare/education workers... almost all are haunted by burn out, widespread job vacancies, and extreme frustration with leaders.
if we had an ounce of class consciousness, there would have been a general strike already of teachers and healthcare workers with sympathy strikes all over.
even with all the circuses and atomization, it still feels like something is going to explode anyway. there's a fragility in the air around everything.
tick tick tick tick. it's coming.
they just ended the eviction moratorium and unemployment benefits too.
we need to radicalize people that all the homeless people everywhere that everyone hates seeing are going to grow and the more homeless people you see, the more it reflects a failure to deal with the pandemic justly.
tick tick tiBOOM.
We need people, every time they see a homeless person, to think “wow capitalism really left us to fucking die on the streets during a pandemic didn’t it?”
I agree, its been very weird that I'm also having the same experiences since going back to college and work. Everyone is happy to be back, but I think that fragility feeling is everyone has also now realized that America is not an unstoppable ceaseless goliath; That something as small as a virus or CO2 can completely destroy our lives. Maybe that our way of life also needs to be destroyed.
To be honest, I thought our response was going to be....decent. I wasn't a pinko yet, but I was getting there just from coming to my own conclusions given my experiences but man it was fucking incredible to see how ridiculously badly the US got spanked by one germy boi
I knew the responce was going to be dogshit because there is no profit incentive in properly enforcing the quarantine rules. There's a negative incentive to it, quarantining costs money but saves lives. We dont do that, we burn people for money.