An Open Letter to Family and Friends

Dear people who say they love me,

I need you to care about ableism and the ways you’re embedded in it, invested in its attitudes and stereotypes. I want you to give a damn.

I want you to care about the harm caused by ableism and about the people it harms most.

I want you to care about how your attitudes, multiplied by hundreds of millions of people, amount to profound suffering, isolation, abandonment and endangerment, as well as death for so many disabled people.

Everyone I know who still masks consistently is struggling with horrific isolation. Most of us are housing insecure; two of my friends are verging on imminent homelessness. Most cannot get safe health care and a couple have been actively damaged grievously in seeking what could not be avoided. Several in my larger communities have died or been disabled as a direct result of someone passing on an infection to them.

What is this callousness that shrugs in the face of that?

What does RESIST mean if not use the power you DO have to stop being a link in the chain of harm and structural violence?

You have the power to reject the norm that we have no responsibility to protect each other. You have the power to refuse to be a link in the chains of transmission that leave many chronically ill and newly disabled in their wake. You have the opportunity to NOT pass on dangerous pathogens, to resist community abandonment and capitulation to policies of mass infection.

You have the power to reject the norm that we don’t really need to think about long covid if up to date on vaccinations. The science has never been there to support that and we know definitively now that millions of vaccinated people have long covid (as do millions of those who did not get the Covid vaccines).

There’s no rational argument for acting like long covid has nothing to do with you. You are at risk as well as every person down a chain of transmission you were part of.

You can transmit asymptomatically or presymptomatically (infectious for 1-2 days before symptoms emerge).

Asymptomatic infections are 40-60% of infections. You’re as likely to pass on a SARS-CoV-2 infection when you feel perfectly healthy as you are when you feel sick. Far more likely to, actually, if you do mask consistently when you feel sick.

While estimates vary the conservative numbers indicate Covid’s longer term effects and silent damage are impacting a minimum of (so far) 1 in 15 people. The WHO says that 15-20% of the global population has Long Covid. The CDC says 1:5.

1:5 is worse odds than Russian roulette. A recent review of the scientific literature published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that Long Covid has surpassed asthma as the number one illness in kids, infants and toddlers. How is it okay not to protect each other, and the children, especially when the odds are so horrific?

You have the power to model protecting yourself and others, and those who’ve been abandoned by both parties, by acknowledging that if 40-60% of Covid infections are asymptomatic, you cannot know you’re not passing along an infection when you’re not masking in public.

I don’t understand the apathy about this. That the great majority of otherwise caring people in my life collectively decided NOT protecting each other is just fine has broken me.

Why is none of this your responsibility? Do you think it’s right that the disabled, immunocompromised and multiply-marginalized and all of those who are currently most vulnerable have been abandoned and stigmatized, pushed hard to the margins like this?

And if it is not right, why are you going along with it? Why aren’t you standing here beside us in the fight?

Why do you go along with the cheapening of our lives, our deaths, our suffering and our precarity by capitulating to this norm, fueling it with your unmasked behavior?

Nothing I’ve said has inspired the people in my life to care about this. Not in the way that feels like I can trust y’all to have our backs as the fascism escalates.

I don’t know how to tell you how high the stakes are for us right now, and liberals and leftists treating disabled people like they are disposable is a huge part of the problem.

We would not be where we are with the Trump/RFK/MAHA escalation in open eugenics if the great majority of liberals and democrat loyalists did not follow the Biden Harris administration into the normalization of abandoning “the vulnerable”. If y’all hadn’t been complacent, or worse, in denial, about Biden/Harris admin’s catastrophic dismantling of public health precedents and architecture. If you hadn’t been in denial about the severity of this pandemic—to this day.

We wouldn’t be here if a majority of libs, progressives and yes, actual leftists, hadn’t been so eager to pretend long covid was no big deal.

We wouldn’t be here if the majority of libs and leftists actually meant what they said in 2020, that we mask to protect our communities and each other.

We wouldn’t be here if a majority of libs and leftists had held the damn line against the rightward lunge of the Biden admin, the casual brutality of its implementation of eugenics, its escalating stigmatization and >othering< of those still taking covid seriously, those still taking community care seriously.

We wouldn’t be where we are today if the great majority of liberals hadn’t been willing to follow MAGA and the convoy mob into justifications for why protecting the vulnerable, and protecting each other generally, is no one’s responsibility.

The Biden/Harris administration said directly “the vulnerable will fall by the wayside” and you all nodded along as if that were the tragic but necessary approach.

They successfully ushered the libs and progressives into an acceptance of most of the very same right-wing policies and attitudes toward those (currently more) vulnerable that y’all hated when it was only red MAGA advocating everyone for himself. (Dems be like, “no, that’s different because we advocate for everyone for themselves.” lolsob)

This apathy, this continuous capitulation to more and more overt right-wing attitudes and policies, is killing people. Millions of them. It has disabled, according to The Economist, 400 million people and counting. It has resulted in the deaths of over 30 million people globally.

Most who’ve embraced the new “normal” are also unwilling to acknowledge that even if it were only the sickening and the deaths of that group of >others< over there, your complacency in the face of these attitudes being normalized and mainstreamed makes you a danger to your communities.

You do not seem to understand that you are a part of this rise in eugenics. You do not seem to be willing to honestly confront how your normalization of this right wing “eh we can just leave the vulnerable behind, oh well” bigotry and attitudes is harmful.

What my friends and I are struggling with is not separate from how the rest of you decided to normalize the behaviors that isolate and endanger a great many people.

All my disabled friends have experienced this kind of apathy and lack of solidarity from their progressive, liberal or conservative families and old friends. It is the norm for every person I know who refused to give in to the idea that we don’t owe each other protection from a dangerous pathogen.

Transmission has remained high after vax & relax onboarded libs into these eugenicist, violent norms.

Long Covid is a problem of unfathomable scale. A problem the ruling class has NO intention of addressing meaningfully.

In the face of these murderous inhumane community-destroying norms and policies, I want your solidarity. I want you to be unwilling to accept these norms.

I want you to recognize you may not have meant to have gotten swept into right-wing attitudes, but you did.

I want you to recognize you may not have meant to fall into apathy about the dangers of helping normalize the abandonment of disabled people, and the abandonment of community care, but you did.

How can liberals moan endlessly about how horrible the fascism is in this country, while also thinking it’s not their responsibility to make changes that could help immediately protect those most targeted and at risk in the face of these fascist projects (MAHA/MAGA, Biden’s Covid eugenics, hyperindividualization of pandemic responsibility)?

How outraged are you really if you aren’t willing to use the power you have to wear masks to protect those who are dying and being harmed right now by the fascism you bemoan?

I don’t understand how liberals can wring hands day in day out about how scary the red MAGA fascists are while happily going along with pandemic minimization. While continuing to pretend a vaccine rapidly being made ever more inaccessible to large contingent of the population, a vaccine that also does not stop transmission or infection, is all that’s necessary to protect each other from this neuroinvasive vasculopathic virus.

We have over 460,000 studies now on SARS-CoV-2. In composite this evidence shows that in the long term Covid infections cause vascular disease, serious neurological damage, organ disease, immune deficiency, strokes, heart attacks and dementia, and looks likely to be oncogenic (cancer-causing). This research also shows that your risk of suffering these impacts compounds with each subsequent Covid infection.

How is anyone who prides themselves on being pro-science acting like a vaccine rapidly being made ever more inaccessible to large contingent of the population is all that’s necessary to protect each other from this neuroinvasive virus, when it wasn’t even close to sufficient even when we had good uptake?

If you were okay with it because you need to believe that the vaccine made it okay for you to ignore those most immediately at risk for worst outcomes, can you not at least acknowledge that now that Trump, RFK & Co have made it nearly impossible for millions to access the vaccine at all? And that therefore the fantasy that getting the vaccine alone is sufficient to protect your communities isn’t even relevant anymore?

Can you acknowledge that? Will you think about the implications?

So dear friends & family, I’ve been trying to get you to care and to get curious about the ways you are ableist, and the ways you are consenting to and participating in eugenics, to no avail.

With very few exceptions, y’all have resisted and rejected every invitation to give a fuck about this form of bigotry. Which is weird, because you all identify as caring, not-bigoted people.

Why is that?

Does it not merit some self-reflection?

I’m heartbroken at the apathy disabled people are met with so much of the time when we ask for your solidarity, your willingness to learn from us, to walk alongside us as we fight for our lives, to step up as advocates for us, simply because we deserve advocates and solidarity and not enough people care.

Please, I beg you from the bottom of my heart, reconsider. Become willing to look at how serious the crisis of long covid is. Be willing to get honest with yourselves about how you’ve gone along with it. You can change course at any time. Everyone you love will be better off if you do.