Solidarity sister. The struggle to get people, much less fellow leftists, should not be this difficult. Yet, here we are. I long for a community but its nowhere to be found here, or online it seems. Nothing left to do but soldier on.

old: wearing a mask to protect myself and everyone around me

gold: wearing a mask so i pass more easily

It should not be controversial to say "it is now always raining, and we need to take umbrellas everywhere," but it is and it is across every political tendency. This is the new normal no matter what anyone says, and they'll be forced to confront sooner or later that getting sick is bad, actually, and there are very accessible things to be done about it indeed on an individual level that can grow to institutional and systemic change. The latter will not happen without the former. The world changed in 2020 and we are not changing with it. That is a recipe for disaster.

I get it that’s hard to accept, idk, giving up your (unprotected, so most) of your social life because you wear a respirator and that you will have to do it forever, but for me it ties in with the otherwise completely scientific ML analysis I have of the world.

This is 100% the correct, materialist analysis, yes.

I go outside and if not harassed I get treated like a weird outcast, which I am used to because of my politics, but I really do not see how to enagage with such people.

I don't, not anymore, except maybe to poke holes in their flimsy reasoning to the extent that my mental capacity allows at any one time. Imani Barbarin says that her politics are "the disabled," and that's where I've landed after all of this. To any "leftist," "communist," whatever that tries to tell me they're building the revolution without a mask, I say "good luck, chum" and leave. Their movement is doomed, and eventually they will figure that out or they will die. I am determined to survive either way and no one is going to stop me.

I still mask of course, and maybe this doesn't apply to me as much because I don't exactly have a thriving social life to begin with, but on the whole I would say that masking has not harmed or impeded my social life at all. If anything, it has given me opportunities to improve or expand it. On the occasions that I do interact with strangers who are also masked, there is an immediate sense of solidarity, an unspoken connection that "yeah it sucks how hardly anybody masks anymore but it's really cool to see that some of us still do!" It might be frustrating that these occasions are rare, but they do happen, and it is by virtue of their rarity that they make for such good inroads to start a conversation. I do get plenty of dirty looks from non-maskers too of course, but fuck 'em, I've had to learn to ignore dirty looks of disapproval and disdain from people for other reasons that long preceded covid.

I completely agree with you how disheartening it is to see how many leftists have just given up and given in to the bourgeois dictate that somehow masking is useless now.

Liberalism is hegemonic and this is unironically a way that people reveal their unconscious continued subscription to it. Biden gave permission to the liberals and therefore the "leftists" largely fell in line. The permission was not given with public health reasons or basic medical reasons, but for the literal thing that "leftists" are motivated against: capitalist profits. This was a golden opportunity to agitate and differentiate, but instead we have seen more opportunism, even some communist organizations claiming that you shouldn't wear masks because it will alienate your proletarian audience.

It is a helpful reminder that the context in which we organize is full of contradiction as well, that internal organizing and basic media criticism are paramount, and that one always needs a check on being "clever" with stratagems and how to "trick" proles into agreeing with you. The pandemic is in no way the only way in which this is the case, where internalized liberalism hampers the project and its membership, and so the evergreen question is which form we should focus on purging next, and then after that, and so on, in order for us to succeed in our overarching project of moving past capitalism.

Not the point of your post but wanted to offer some hope for other maskers who fear it interfering with their social life.

I mask 99% of when im outside my house/car (sometimes I take it off on my way to my car or to drink something if its hot but i move away from other people if i do that or ill eat or drink something in an empy room before other people show up to work but those are pretty rare) and my social life is at the point where im doing something almost every weekend.

I might be taking less precautions than other people here (im okay with going on crowed public transportation while masked and other somewhat crowded spaces but do have an arbitrary limit of what I feel comfortable with) but I do think its possible to mask full time (or close to full time with my few exceptions mentioned above) and still have a fulfilling social life.

That’s weird, it’s more like whatever dude reaction in my case, although i mask only on train and in big gatherings

I crack a joke its because my breath is dreadful and walk away with a chuckle