OPINION
[…] However, the best tool to fight the pandemic right now has an undeserved bad rap. During the lockdowns, the Ardern government missed its chance to get everyone to embrace masks for what they are: a fucking godsend and literal lifesaver. We made a mistake in framing masking as a dreary obligation to others, when in reality it’s a nigh-miraculous gift to yourself. To have the air (including outdoors, I’m sorry to say) hung with immunity-destroying poison and to remain uninfected, to be able to go about your daily life with a few adjustments and stay healthy. You don’t have to like yourself to remember that doing the things you love – going for a run, visiting your niece, retaining the brainpower to make art — is something deeply worth protecting.
Yep, Covid is everywhere folks. It will hunt you down even when you’re walking down to the dairy. And the only way to save yourself is to put on your mask.
[…] If you’re finding it too hard to go thermonuclear and mask everywhere, as I now do, you can still make some starts. Inconsistent masking is better than never masking at all; it encourages other people to mask, and it could still make the difference between staying healthy or lying in bed with bone-crushing fatigue. In some ways it gets easier once it’s a habit. The other day, I successfully wore an N95 while aquajogging; if that isn’t a flex on God and country I don’t know what is. Wearing a mask is the opposite of living in fear: it’s facing the facts and braving daily discomfort to treat your own life as worthwhile.
Wearing a N95 mask when aquajogging? Really? And the author wants to skite about it? Oh, and wearing a mask is the very definition of living in fear. It’s the equivalent of someone wearing a burqa to prevent being raped.
I got Covid on December 21, eventually recovered from the flu-like symptoms, then overdid it slightly by cleaning my room and going for some short walks. On New Year’s Day, it started to hit me that I couldn’t walk around much. When I did move around the house, it was at the pace of an elderly man. It didn’t feel like heart palpitations or breathlessness, though I had both of those – it was a bone-deep awareness that I could not move fast or something bad was going to happen. Weeks later, I triumphed when I could walk as far as the pharmacy, 800m away from my house.
Wait, what? I thought wearing a mask was supposed to protect you from getting Covid?
It took over six weeks to get there; maybe not long Covid, but long enough for me to grieve. To face the horror of what the pandemic has done, what being politically abandoned truly means, to realise that a mask will almost never leave my face for the foreseeable future, to know that my life may have just shortened by several years. I watched documentaries about Act Up, the political group that fought Aids in the 80s and 90s, and sobbed as people spoke on screen about how “I may not be able to fight the disease, but I can fight the system”, people who died not long afterwards. Some of these people were infected asymptomatically by HIV a decade before they died. Given how Covid similarly attacks the immune system, we can’t yet be sure it won’t happen to us down the line.
“Almost never.” That means no eating out. It means not being able to talk to others in public. It means hiding your face everywhere you go. Sure, that’s worth it to ‘prevent’ getting a virus which is now no worse than a common cold.
[…] Nowadays, rich people have their antivirals, PCR tests, monoclonal antibodies, nasal photodisinfections, UV lights that kill viruses, air purifiers and CO2 monitors. When they’re photographed maskless, they only look like they’re not taking precautions. When Biden did a maskless speech at a school gym, they took out the windows and put in giant temporary ventilators.
Readers with a few million dollars lying around may like to enlighten me as I’ve never heard of nasal photodisinfections or virus-killing UV lights or CO2 monitors, etc.
At times, I have struggled to not get angry with people I know, particularly progressives, for abandoning masks. For the moment, though, I want to treat every powerless person in this mess with care and gentleness. Everyone has trauma around the pandemic, and almost everyone is staying in denial because it feels like the only other option is giving in to crushing despair. Both of those feelings come from propaganda we’re absorbing, not fact. I keep faith against what looks like apathy by knowing that no one wants the pandemic, that most people appreciated the Labour Government’s initial response despite how hard it was, that people were disappointed in their failure to handle the virus after 2021, that almost everyone fucking loathed Convoy 2022.
Ah, yeah, sure… “Most people appreciated”, “everyone fucking loathed Convoy 22”, yada yada yada.
So there you have it. People wear masks everywhere because they’re idiots. They think Covid is everywhere, ready to infect them unless they keep their masks on at all times. They’re the kind of people who willingly give up their freedom in exchange for ‘security’ and thus deserve neither.
And if you want to fully appreciate the author’s depth of idiocy, here is a link to the article in full.