At night I ride my bike through town just to be around people, and maybe every 100th person is wearing a mask. I rode past an Applebee's last night and saw through the windows that it was packed. I'm beginning to deal with my first real creeping tendrils of misanthropy. I know it's reactionary and intellectually I know it's reductive and unhelpful to blame these people for being lied to by a sociopathic government, especially when most of them just want some respite from their precarious shitty jobs and lives. But at the same time, I can't get the 1,250,000 plus dead people out of my head. What would they say if they could see the absolute lack of impression, the seemingly negative lessons learned, the utter refusal to stop consuming for a second or even just put on a fucking mask? It chills me, the casual brushing off of this mass murder, the capitalist response that straight up amounts to eugenics. When I pass by people on the street at night, crucially at night, those on their walks with their dog or their partner or just their thoughts, I seem to see an honest sadness and exhaustion in many of their faces. I wish I could talk to them, but what would I even say? It's all so obviously far gone at this point, and if they knew how bad it really is I don't know how they'd react. The truly checked out ones, the ones I see packing the clubs at night, I regard with a strange mix of pity, horror, envy and anger.
I think that for all I may feel about the people immediately around me, I must always remember who and what is really responsible for these years of horror. That's what separates us from the reactionaries. But god is it hard sometimes.
Just wanna let you know you're not the only one horrified to the societal indifference to the mass suffering, disabling, and death brought upon by COVID. I get the same misanthropic thoughts from time to time since hardly anyone gives a shit about the pandemic anymore, but deep down, I know that propaganda works and these people are being gravely misled about the nature of the pandemic and the ongoing danger.
I genuinely have no idea what the fuck to expect in the future, and that's the scary thing--I don't think any of us can predict how things are going to go down. I'm just so jaded by the societal callous indifference and normalization of mass death and suffering. I don't know what it would take for more people to start taking things seriously again. An escape variant with a noticeably higher fatality rate? Perpetually overloaded hospitals? More anecdotal stories of people knowing someone who died from or was disabled from COVID? Long COVID eventually manifesting in much worse ways than what we currently know?
Where is the line though? Should I pity racists, homophobes, nationalists, US soldiers, cops, I mean its the same system that instilled those beliefs. Maybe it's useless and self righteous but all the "fuck yeah science!" libs now out spreading disease in the name of capitalism can get fucked. I hate them lol.
"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality." -Che
Hate them if you must, but the revolution is to free everyone, comrade. Whether they like it or not.
One way to handle your very reasonable misanthropic response is to categorize this cultural sociopathy as just that: a symptom of deeper cultural problems well outside any one person's control. You can hope for how people do not actually need to be that way, but are made so by society, by our social relations, and the dominant forces around them, and those things can and will all change.
But it does mean that 95% of your society is easily manipulated into sociopathic prioritization of slight inconvenience over folks' health and the continuation of a pandemic. I think they could also be easily manipulated into the exact opposite response, if we removed the reins from capital. And hell, eventually we could create our society in a way that required no manipulation for this to happen, where we can build up ourselves and each other into truly empathetic and thoughtful people.
AIDs has killed more people than covid but you probably already have gotten to a healthy place thinking about that in terms of not blaming people living in sickening times for getting sick. The same will happen with covid for you, given time.
At night I ride my bike through town just to be around people, and maybe every 100th person is wearing a mask. I rode past an Applebee's last night and saw through the windows that it was packed. I'm beginning to deal with my first real creeping tendrils of misanthropy. I know it's reactionary and intellectually I know it's reductive and unhelpful to blame these people for being lied to by a sociopathic government, especially when most of them just want some respite from their precarious shitty jobs and lives. But at the same time, I can't get the 1,250,000 plus dead people out of my head. What would they say if they could see the absolute lack of impression, the seemingly negative lessons learned, the utter refusal to stop consuming for a second or even just put on a fucking mask? It chills me, the casual brushing off of this mass murder, the capitalist response that straight up amounts to eugenics. When I pass by people on the street at night, crucially at night, those on their walks with their dog or their partner or just their thoughts, I seem to see an honest sadness and exhaustion in many of their faces. I wish I could talk to them, but what would I even say? It's all so obviously far gone at this point, and if they knew how bad it really is I don't know how they'd react. The truly checked out ones, the ones I see packing the clubs at night, I regard with a strange mix of pity, horror, envy and anger.
I think that for all I may feel about the people immediately around me, I must always remember who and what is really responsible for these years of horror. That's what separates us from the reactionaries. But god is it hard sometimes.
Just wanna let you know you're not the only one horrified to the societal indifference to the mass suffering, disabling, and death brought upon by COVID. I get the same misanthropic thoughts from time to time since hardly anyone gives a shit about the pandemic anymore, but deep down, I know that propaganda works and these people are being gravely misled about the nature of the pandemic and the ongoing danger.
I genuinely have no idea what the fuck to expect in the future, and that's the scary thing--I don't think any of us can predict how things are going to go down. I'm just so jaded by the societal callous indifference and normalization of mass death and suffering. I don't know what it would take for more people to start taking things seriously again. An escape variant with a noticeably higher fatality rate? Perpetually overloaded hospitals? More anecdotal stories of people knowing someone who died from or was disabled from COVID? Long COVID eventually manifesting in much worse ways than what we currently know?
Where is the line though? Should I pity racists, homophobes, nationalists, US soldiers, cops, I mean its the same system that instilled those beliefs. Maybe it's useless and self righteous but all the "fuck yeah science!" libs now out spreading disease in the name of capitalism can get fucked. I hate them lol.
"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality." -Che
Hate them if you must, but the revolution is to free everyone, comrade. Whether they like it or not.
One way to handle your very reasonable misanthropic response is to categorize this cultural sociopathy as just that: a symptom of deeper cultural problems well outside any one person's control. You can hope for how people do not actually need to be that way, but are made so by society, by our social relations, and the dominant forces around them, and those things can and will all change.
But it does mean that 95% of your society is easily manipulated into sociopathic prioritization of slight inconvenience over folks' health and the continuation of a pandemic. I think they could also be easily manipulated into the exact opposite response, if we removed the reins from capital. And hell, eventually we could create our society in a way that required no manipulation for this to happen, where we can build up ourselves and each other into truly empathetic and thoughtful people.
AIDs has killed more people than covid but you probably already have gotten to a healthy place thinking about that in terms of not blaming people living in sickening times for getting sick. The same will happen with covid for you, given time.