chat

You're totally fine. I think that is the correct reading, for the record. Which is why I say that I am glad it was made before COVID, when that reading would have resonated with me, and I can re-contextualize it for the time period it was written. It would not (does not) resonate today. Today, if I were to meet Steban and Ulixes, the representatives of that hope for and resilience of the future present in a war-torn world facing encroaching oblivion, they would tell me that asking their demonstrations to require masking is too alienating to the proletariat, and they won't be doing that, actually. Precious lines about stars going out in the darkness notwithstanding.

In the real world, COVID was the trial run for how, during a genuine Earth-shattering crisis, a global movement in the modern age materializes, and nowhere in the world was able to meet that very important bar*—how can I believe that we will Do Climate Action, another practically Olympian feat and one just as if not more threatening, let alone Do Communism, a relative pipe dream, in this light? I can't. I can't ignore what's happening in front of me every day, and what's happening is the era of blackest reaction, gleefully. Remember how a strain of the flu went extinct in the US when only half the population (a generous estimate, even in the early years) were wearing unfit cloth masks—not even proper respirators! Remember when the viral memes all over social media were about nature healing and returning to us when we stopped it all for just a few months? Everyone said no, to that, after a while. Overwhelmingly, and around the globe. Look at what we accomplished when we were merely half-assing it, and we refuse!

The future is unknown, and nothing is forever. I'll do what I always do: what I can. Fighting is in my blood. I couldn't stop if I wanted to. In spite of that, I do not have hope, and no one will be able to convince me to hope in this world, with the people that made and continue to make this. We aren't totally helpless lemmings at the whims of our overlords, not completely, not everywhere; we're all complicit in this as far as I'm concerned. We've by and large abandoned each other, and especially the most vulnerable among us. It's not just leadership. China's Zero COVID was supremely unpopular, and what eventually led to its retraction. Try asking your next PSL chapter meeting to mask up. They won't. This is what's necessary, and even those without the genocidal, fascistic tendencies of the worst of us won't abide. How could I not loathe this outcome and everyone who perpetuate it?

*That said, credit must be given to the few countries that stuck it out for years despite global pressures. China and I believe Taiwan, too? New Zealand. There were others, as well, but those are the ones that come to mind right away.