the big forget

snippets

insights into some moments from the interviews

“I take COVID seriously as in I know it has long term possibilities of fucking your health in very many different ways. I have this knowledge now. I was surrounded by people who looked into COVID and shared knowledge about it and I cannot forget what I know. I cannot act as if I don't know what I know. That is the basis of my COVID precautions: I cannot just ignore this. I have to take this seriously. “
on the german healthcare system "I went to my Hausarzt (doctor) when I first had Long Covid symptoms. As soon as I got there she wrote that I had generalized anxiety syndrome. I don't have anxiety and I have never had anxiety in my life, but she said that I was anxious. I got new heart medication now and everything is working out a little bit better. But it took me 2 years to get here."
"I feel like we are reaching a point where two things are happening very deeply at the same time. We have an outstanding amount of data and research now and it is very clear that COVID is very bad for you. And at the same time, the more data we have, and the more research we have, the more people are denying it."
How has your political organising been impacted? “I have less hope honestly. If we can't integrate COVID into our understanding of the world then to some extent I think it shows a sense of powerlessness. I think people are refusing to integrate it, like refusing the challenge, which feels like a signal that we are not that strong. When people refuse to deal with the fact that COVID is very dangerous and that we can't just live as if it doesn't exist without serious consequences, it makes people less credible to me in their political work and it also makes the work we try to do together less credible to me.”
“I will never forget how everyone sacrificed our sick lives for their comfort.”
“I don't think I would still be here if it weren't for the sick people I learned so much from, they helped me so much. I'm not even sure if I would still be alive, to be honest, if I wouldn't have all the sick people I met in my life, who have so much knowledge.”
"COVID has radicalised me in terms of understanding healthcare systems and how they deal with and eliminate threats to the capitalist system by letting them die. If we had a system that actually prioritised the lives of people with disabilities then the capitalist system could not work. It could not sustain itself. Letting people die is the ultimate act of sovereignty of the state. Necropolitics and Foucaldian Biopolitics are not just about police and war. It is also about the medical system, and how we force people to either die by neglect or malpractice. Less people draining the system. It is about manufacturing consent to kill people who do not work."
“Just in the last two months I know three more friends with Long COVID.”
The far right presents a compelling COVID narrative and continues to openly discuss the pandemic. Meanwhile the left has no analysis of COVID and no rebuttal to far right talking points. It is impossible to combat fascism whilst also giving them an open goal. When the state declared the pandemic over and said it was time to get “back to normal”, supposed radicals and revolutionaries accepted this without question. What happened to our analysis of “normal” as a social and political construct, a set of circumstances borne of the conflict between labour and capital? What happened to our anti work politics? If we can’t integrate COVID into our political analysis and praxis - if we can’t even talk about it or accept that it happened, let alone that it is an ongoing crisis - how can we have any faith in our organising? Creating a better world requires change. Do we want to change?”
n the culture of denial "It depends on the actors. If we're thinking the capitalist class: it's about profit. People needed to go back to work. Real estate was loosing money. Everyone was working from home. That's not good enough, let's go, everyone get back to work If we are talking about the state: it is a necropolitics and biopolitics project of culling the more vulnerable. The vulnerable cannot work and if they're not good to work, they're not worthy of life, and they should be eliminated. If we are talking about the normal person next door: it's probably a lot of unprocessed grief and trauma. Not being able to handle what happened and also not wanting to be or to feel like a bad person. If you think about, okay, the last 5 years I've been both breathing in and infecting other people with this deadly virus. What does it say about me? It's just very convenient to just pretend that it didn't happen, or pretend it's not that bad, or pretend it wasn't me, or pretend i'm not sick."
“Proactively safeguarding your health is perceived as a weakness in our society. In youth culture specifically, it's seen as uncool. Unless it is directly contributing to a standard beauty norm. If you're going to the gym, if you're eating “clean”, if you're doing it because you want to look “good” then it's like, oh my god, so inspiring! But if someone rocks up sick, and you're like, hey, why don't you stay home? Then they're like, get over it, why are you such a germaphobe?”
“It is a tool of imperialism and capitalism to condition people to not really give a shit about themselves, so they are more useful disposable tools for the system.”
Black text on white background: “I feel like I'm used to being lonely and just doing my thing. I do believe in a lot of things that make me a little bit out of the norm. I'm a vegan. I'm a non-monogamous person. I believe in the abolition of the state. I’m non-binary. I’m bisexual. Now with COVID, it's just one more layer of loneliness on top of what I already had."
“I will never forget losing my job, losing the ability to eat, having triple vision for 6 months, not being able to think straight, not being able to tolerate listening to music, not being able to look at my phone and type at the same time”
"It was a very difficult moment and I understand that. Even if you didn't lose anyone directly, just knowing that so many people died and that people were suffering. We would see a lot of those videos from the hospitals. I think it was very shocking and I don't think most people had any kind of psychological support at the time. So I really understand the urge to just look away and not engage with it. But in the long term, that's really damaging.”
"I feel like I have been really, really radicalised. By seeing how people with disabilities are treated by the state and the system and how we treat people with disabilities. COVID specifically showed me a lot about medical neglect and racism in medicine and ableism in medicine. I feel that I would like to be a doctor someday because I don't trust doctors anymore at all"
“It does seem to work almost like people succumbing to a spell. I see the denial in loads of ways. When you try and explain this to people they don't try and argue back. But they also can't meet you. Their eyes just glaze over. They don’t push back. But they are also not like well you know, you make your choices, I make my choices. You try and reach them in a way that in almost any other conversation you would be able to reach them, even if it was controversial or even if you did disagree. It's this really specific thing where they are receving the information but their eyes just glaze over. It's so specific. It's like a spell."
"I'm really in my fucking rage era about it. I've always been angry about it, but I think the durational, long form nature of what it's been at this point is unlocking a new type of rage. I'm very enraged and bitter about it. My career is fucked. My finances are fucked fucked. I'm desperately trying to find a job that I can do so I don't get into trouble but that is not going to make me sicker. This has affected every facet of my life. My romantic prospects, my friendships. I've lost really great friends."
“I have had such a journey with it. I’m not proud of the ways I was in this disconnect. The ways I was not aware and not cautious. I was more ignorant than I wish I was. My relationship to it feels very different now. Because of comrades, because of the lived experiences of myself and people around me.”
"This is one of the only things that has kept me sane when everyone is behaving as if i'm nuts. I'm also a climate activist and was climate aware from quite early on. As horrific as that experience has been, seeing climate collapse coming at a time where we could have done something about it and then seeing this very slow death march into the abyss. Now with COVID denial, that previous experience has kind of been validating, because that was also spending a decade being alone in a conviction and trying to engage people on it. Experiencing the similiar eye glaze or a mocking kind of condescension or people speaking with a lot of confidence about something that they were totally wrong about. Now being on the other side of that, where every single fucking prediction, every warning, has come true. Seeing that those people were actually just wrong and willfully ignorant and so invested in their wrongness. It was everybody. The whole of society. The news. The supposedly academic debates on TV where you would have a very smug and condescending interviewer interviewing a climate scientist and just gaslighting them. That has been a useful reference for what it feels like to be gaslit by the whole world but also be right. That's one of the only things that has made it possible to be like, I am right about this."
“I think there are lots of people who are in a middle ground of still caring and being aware of what disability justice is and wanting to care, but somehow it’s not embodied, or in practice they don’t believe or feel it is as serious as it actually is.”
"Thinking about my past self, and about friends of mine, seeing that people are doing work on this topic helps make us recommit to our ethics and our politics. It definitely has had an impact on me. We impact each other. If I see that my comrades and friends are being aligned with their ethics then it really is an incentive for me to follow that alignment."