Thread by @JuliusGoat

The human capacity to ignore the most relevant part of an issue in order to believe what they want to believe is extraordinary.

In the case of the pandemic, that thing is increasingly this: that we are still in a pandemic, and the pandemic is still a destabilizing problem.

There are many reasons we remain in pandemic. Some may prove endemic. Most are systemic political blocks to coordinated responses that are possible and necessary, but not yet attempted.

It's tiring. It's awful.

Nevertheless, we remain in a pandemic, which remains destabilizing.

The problem of the virus is a systemic one, and the system is the human body.

The unwillingness/inability to effectively counter it is a political one, which is its own type of systemic problem.

In this country especially, the problem is cultural. We have a culture of neglect.

We have our cultural traditions of supremacy, many of which are intentional and deliberately malicious, but the overriding culture I detect is indifference.

It's an unwillingness to pay the cost of helping those who need it, led by a desire to not even know about the need.

If you have streets, your systems maintain them, or they will fall into disrepair.

If your streets are broken, your systems fix them, or they stay broken.

If your systems refuse to do this, your systems are broken.

At which point the question becomes: do you care?

And if our systems only fix some of the streets, then they are communicating its culture's priorities.

The method of communication is neglect.

But the streets remain broken, and a system that only fixes some streets may someday neglect yours.

The question remains: do you care?

If your street is fixed, maybe you decide you don't care, because if you care, then you still need to do something about it, and the streets you need are mostly fine.

The thing to do then is, find a rationale to not care.

My observation is that any reason will do.

We're talking about how we treat streets. We could be talking about many things.

We could be talking about how we treat people who are sick, for example. Or people who take care of the sick. Or others who keep society running for us.

A society that neglects its streets might well treat the people who keep a society running, who servicing its essential systems, as disposable.

What I like about the street metaphor is, it's not a metaphor.

There are problems with all of this, many of which are moral, spiritual, political, or philosophical.

But there's a practical problem: people aren't disposable, and if you dispose of them, your society will crumble.

And we are still in a pandemic.

So: we have vaccines, which we should mandate, as we've mandate others. And these vaccines have restored a degree of normalcy for many months to many of us.

But immunocompromised people don't enjoy the full benefits of the vaccine.

The question as always is: do we care?

Earlier this week I wrote a thread I'm not linking to, because it's resulted in my hosting this week's Twitter fight.

A lot of people don't care, and they resent people who do, and they resent any reminder of it.

They have found their reasons to not care.

Any reason will do.

A lot of people choose to simply ignore the evidence that prevention methods are effective—when applied.

Some point to the fact that LOTS of people die.

Many use laughably specious logical fallacy.

Many just state flatly: they don't care.

And yet, we remain in a pandemic.

The most common reason I've seen is that the virus is "endemic," in other words, inevitable.

This may prove true. The problem is they're using it as a reason, not to redouble our efforts to build infrastructure and policy to deal with it, but to stop dealing with it at all.

It's almost as if a culture of indifference will teach itself indifference to anything, and our power structures of wealth representation are counting on it.

Almost exactly like that.

And the problem is: we remain in a pandemic.

The answer to this question is: I don't know.

I know we can't just declare we're done with it because we want to be done.

When it surges, we must take appropriate precaution. When it doesn't, we must install appropriate safeguards against future surge.

https://twitter.com/Henrydmitchell1/status/1481698158296059906?s=20

And my answer to this is: those who are listening to immunosuppressed, disabled, and otherwise at-risk people actually ARE listening to other perspectives in solidarity.

I hope we refuse re-engage with our comfortable old cultural indifference. We must.

https://twitter.com/ed_santilla/status/1481698690318307328?s=20

When does it end? It might not end, if this virus truly is endemic.

Maybe we can defeat it. We should certainly make the effort—the real globally coordinated cooperative effort this requires—but if it's not, we might need to create a new normal.

Hopefully a better one.

Any fight against this virus will also have to be a fight against our systemic and viral culture of indifference.

Systems that optimize for indifference remain indifferent to improvement.

Systems that don't improve themselves won't sustain.

And we remain in a pandemic.

/end

If you want more of this sort of thing, this Monday's edition of my newsletter will have it.

getrevue.co/profile/julius…