I quit Facebook a few weeks ago. Shortly after the lockdown protests began in Michigan, I posted an explanation of what their mindset was, why the protests were inevitable, and how bad an idea it was to pretend we could keep them from happening. I was dog piled by a load of people trying to explain to me in tiny words why the best way to keep the novel coronavirus from spreading was to keep people inside and away from each other. The only reply I could give them was yes, I know what science says, I'm telling you what people are actually going to do. This exact thing has happened during every pandemic in recorded human history, up to and including the fictional Corrupted Blood debuff in World of Warcraft.
It is a horrible idea to predicate your public health plans on the assumptions that 1) people will behave rationally all of the time if you just shout at them loudly enough, or 2) people looking at the same data set will always draw the same conclusions.
All things in life include an element of risk. I don't know about other places, but I don't personally remember a time when Americans were not bombarded with dire warnings about everything in their quotidian existence. Eat eggs, don't eat eggs, living in a city raises your risk of cancer, living in the country raises your risk of tick-borne diseases, coffee will make you live longer, coffee will kill you, salt is dangerous, fat is dangerous, carbs are dangerous, the sun is dangerous, breathing is dangerous.... and all of it is fed to us as if we have a moral imperative to do everything in our power to bring our risk of dying as close to zero as possible. It is acknowledged that the results of a lot of these studies are in conflict, and that it's difficult to sift through all the information to decide which one is more 'correct' about how to keep yourself safe. But never is there room for anyone to conclude that maybe they would rather have that thing in their life, than gamble on statistically raising the odds of living a few more years without it.
In the early days of the AIDS pandemic -- before PrEP, before HAART, after we had acknowledged that HIV was a thing and was killing people -- the only messaging was dire. Sex could kill you! Think twice before you get laid! The underlying assumption was that if you could get people to pause and remember the risk, of course they would decide not to go through with it. We do the same thing today with teenagers, in the secular version of abstinence-only sex education. It does not seem to have crossed anybody's mind at any point that anyone might go over the numbers and decide, yeah, that level of danger is acceptable to me. I want the possible positive outcomes of that action enough to risk the negative ones.
When people start doing just that -- and they always start doing that -- the reaction of the moral authorities is to start bolstering their side of the "rational" argument with fear. They may genuinely believe that their side holds more weight, but surely that will be more obvious if they help it along with a thumb on the scale. It is a known phenomenon that the scarier and more profound the consequences seem, the more probable they look, even if the odds have not changed. It is also a known phenomenon that people will weigh personal experience more heavily than abstract arguments featuring strangers. As anyone who has gone through the DARE program will attest, the more you (and your friends) do something "bad" and come out of it unscathed, the more you view anyone who claims to be an authority as being completely full of shit. Whether they are or not.
All of this is to say, riots were inevitable under the "abstinence-only" model of self-isolation and social distancing. They were as inevitable as the Summer of '69, and the failure of the War on Drugs. They made it a moral imperative to fight a basic human motivation (stay away from your loved ones, abstain from sex, don't seek out pleasurable drugs), "for the good of society". People can only deny basic drives and force themselves to suffer for so long. People still die from complications of AIDS, and they fuck anyway. People still ruin their lives over addictions, and they still take drugs. It was only a question of when it would happen, and what would tip it off.
In this case, the propaganda urging people to accept suffering "for the greater good" has blown up in their faces. All of the people in the streets have done the calculus and decided that overturning the system "for the greater good" is more important than avoiding the personal risk of catching COVID. Which, to be honest, a lot of them were becoming inured to anyway.
We are tired of being told to be afraid, and that the correct way of dealing with this fear is to wall yourself off from the scary thing. I was horrified when I first saw advertisements for "Safr", a ride-sharing service whose selling point was that it was women-only. I mentioned this to a friend, and his reaction was oh of course, it's horrifying that rape culture is so entrenched that the only way to escape it is to establish your own alternate economy. And I said no, that's not it. The part I find upsetting is that we as a culture are normalizing the idea that the correct way of dealing with your personal anxieties is to just refuse to engage with anything in the outside world that makes you uncomfortable. I have seen this accusation lobbed (rightfully) at hyper-conservatives who complain about the push for diversity, but it is just as often true, in other contexts, of hard-line liberals. Men make you nervous? Don't interact with men. Afraid immigrants will take your job? Bar them from entry. Racist words in old books offend your moral sensibility? Demand to be excused from the class. Resent bisexuals for being able to "pass" as heteronormative? Form a group exclusive to gold-star gays and lesbians.
You cannot pad, pillow, and gatekeep your world until nothing in your bubble makes you nervous. That's not how this works. I have not been more than half a mile from my house since March 13th. I have only once been farther than the garbage bins, and it freaked me out so badly I came back in after fifteen minutes. To be clear: I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. This is very bad. The point where I normally yeet myself to the nearest emergency room came and went at least a month ago, and the only reason I didn't go was rampant plague. I am coherent enough to operate a keyboard right now because I had the foresight to order a metric fuckton of gray-market diazepines at the beginning of this whole shitshow. People with fewer resources and less internet savvy are drinking themselves blind, or just melting the fuck down.
And yet, this is the mindset the power structure has been sowing since at at least 2001. Stay in, stay insular. Cocoon yourself. Outside is a threat. The miasma will seep in and destroy your way of life. The authorities are special, they are allowed to roam freely -- but be afraid of other people, be afraid of their proximity, their difference, of the very air that they breathe. Be afraid of Black people, they break laws. Be afraid of strange people, they break quarantine. It is a matter of life and death, so it's okay to emotionally-blackmail your loved ones into doing the same. Be afraid of the police, if they scare you that means they're scaring your enemies away too!
We can't do this anymore. We're tired. If everything is deadly, then nothing is particularly deadly, and it doesn't matter. If all roads lead to ruin, then we're free to just pick which mess we want to be in. A life in unremitting isolation is not a life. It doesn't matter whether we're told it's because of a virus or because "other people" are dangerous animals. No one can do that. No one is going to do that. Have you not, like, met other humans? I don't know why anyone thought that was going to work.
I really don't know where all this is going, other than I fucking told you so, and maybe a warning that if you try to talk to me and I seem a little incoherent, it's only because I refuse to be sober right now for what I feel are completely valid mental health reasons. For the record, I am 8-10 miles outside of the parts of Boston that are intermittently on fire, on the north side of the river, in a very calm suburb where absolutely nothing is happening. The local police force consists of like three bored cops, who spend most of their time attending traffic accidents and telling drunk teenagers to go home. The most violence I have seen in the past few weeks are the squirrels outside my window squabbling over ownership of the pine tree.
The rat is handling this much better. He was chittering his fool head off, loudly, for almost an hour after I turned the lights out last night. I finally went over there to make sure his unbridled joy wasn't because somehow gotten hold of an entire chocolate bar. No; Durnik was just settled down in a HAMMOCK, and it was COMFY, and this made him so HAPPY he had to announce it. I fed him half of a pitted medjool date, making him even happier, and went back to bed.
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