Stunned sad among pods

I was talking with a friend today who said they had not stopped being thrown, stunned, by how much the brutality of the pandemic doesn’t seem to register for so many people. They said they thought they processed at most a fifth of that experience. That speaks to me. I’ve been on the far left for a long time but over the years got less actively in those circles due to changing priorities as I had more kids, moved, work stuff, etc. For me that experience felt kind of isolating but not, I don’t know, pressingly so. (I like Stan Weir’s “I am Lonely” essay on this issue, and there’s something here I can’t articulate yet about the relationship between the left as I, and apparently Weir, experienced it, changes over the life course, and, I suspect, academic jobs. Something to think about later.) The Trump years were awful in a lot of ways but the sense of isolation receded, I think because some people radicalized in that time, and also because there were disputes and lack of consensus in various ways that felt like people were radicalizing but they were not. All of that reduced some of the sense of distance from the political views of people around me. I was pleased when Trump lost the election but Biden’s presidency marked a growing sense of re-isolation, as it became apparent that some of what I’d taken as radicalization by some people just wasn’t that, and as political differences with others on the left became more apparent (and, I think crucially, absence of meaning collectivities in which to process those differences and do things across them). Across those years, which somehow feel both like no time at all and like a huge stretch of time, I’ve also watched extended family experience the ways age is classed - growing vulnerability, changes in (lack of) opportunity, etc - and as my employment got more secure simultaneously began to notice some differences in class background (class stratum background is probably more accurate), which has also fostered more of a sense of isolation.

Then the pandemic hit and again, shifts from a sense of relatively greater proximity - a ‘we’ who try to think and act solidaristically (remember ‘flatten the curve’?) - to greater distance, to where now the mainstream media runs pieces implying it’s absurd to mask. I think for me one tension in this is bound up with my upbringing. I was raised in an intellectually lively household and extended working class family, and was raised to respect expertise and credentials - education was viewed as qualifying people for employment but also substantively, though this was also contested with some populist skepticism and derision, it’s complicated. Having that all as a big part of my upbringing has meant that I identify with and want to be included in officially qualified circles, within which I see myself as not fully at home and do not feel fully fluent. Working in a university this has meant some friction as I’ve realized I have some illusions about credentialing - credentials don’t make people smarter, if anything living further up the food chain seems to produce some offensive ignorance - and those illusions seem to have rooted themselves, and so become able to reproduce themselves, in my heart and mind, so the friction is pretty recurrent. Hard realizations repeated and rarely leading to changed expectations. Anyway, within the pandemic this has all been amplified as I feel on the outs with people I already feel at some level on the outs with and with whom I don’t want to be so. This is of course small potatoes as far as the pandemic’s harms go, but it’s an element of the pandemic that echoes and about which I have even fewer people to talk with than some other pandemic harms.

All of that inflects (or whatever) what my friend said, the horror of feeling surrounded by - and in some ways admiring and wanting to be included with - pod people apparently okay with mass death and government cultivation thereof. It leads to a ‘am I the crazy one here?’ kinds of self doubt (and several times friends who are cut from a similar cloth as I am in terms of how we respond to the pandemic have asked me ‘do you ever feel like you’re losing your mind?’ from this stuff). I occasionally wonder if trauma is sometimes overused, and I also don’t want to, by using that term, elevate my distress to the level of that experienced by people having a far worse pandemic. That said I also think the brute reality of living amid mass death in society is itself traumatizing; I’m inclined to say so for everyone (with some people maybe swallowing that down or acting with - merely apparent - grace amid it more than others of us) but certainly it is for anyone empathetic. What seems to be happening in China right now, for instance, is a nightmare that was threatening on the horizon for a while and it arriving is hard to take, and all of this shit was hard to take before that. And as my friend said the sense that a lot of people aren’t troubled is itself stunning, a kind of additional trauma feedback loop.

There’s a line by Max Horkeimer that I’m not sure I remember exactly, I feel like should because it was the epigraph to my book, something to the effect that when a liberated society finally comes into existence the destruction of so many lives right now and in the past until now won’t then become worth it. Those losses will remain and resonate far after the good society comes about, and if anything part of what the good society will devote itself to is sufficient time to grieve and so to heal.

Having said all of that I also think - and feel some self-doubt here and some reservations about by book - that while the individual positions of grief, vulnerability, respect for fragility, empathy with harmed are certainly valid, even necessary, it is simply not the case that the forces of inhumanity are won over by conveying/explaining/describing those individual positions. Further, those forces at least in their friendly director of HR/PR (i.e. good cop) and condescending savior roles are predisposed to depictions of regularly people as abstractly individualized as weak - hence in need of their protection and authorizing their ventriloquism - while real change is only going to come through disruptive collective action. That collective action might still involve an element of grief, I’m unsure - I remember some powerful Take Back The Night marches but there the grief was woven with intense rage and a sense of collective strength. (On cue as I go to log in post this shit to my stupid little blog a Dear Landlord song comes on my headphones, “Three to the Beach,” the verses despondent - “It's really just the passing of these days that's gonna leave us all set in our ways, we don't have to take that lying down, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that it's been getting harder to relate, and keep myself from drowning in the crowd” while the course a reminder, “We're not that hopeless, we're not as fucked as you think, in short lived moments we can do anything, the fucking joke is we're winning when you blink, in short lived moments lousy with victory.” I should make an effort to spend more time in the midwest despair rock sensibility: everything I can see on the map may be fucked and shattered but the act of articulating that in community asserts - demonstrates - the possibility, through solidarity, of a positive way out however currently unmapped. A related bit of pleasant time; right after posting this I saw on twitter that Peste had done a thread documenting some of the worst of the cynical ghouls enabling murder by covid, and it concluded with "In grief and in anger, we go into 2023 for the furious and fucked over, the lonely and abandoned, and those who believe every preventable death is a terrible failure we should never get over but instead avenge with righteous anger." Well put, and timed well for me personally. https://twitter.com/PesteMagazine/status/1608973029333413894 )