Someday I would love to not have to make these anniversary posts anymore. Four years ago, Saturday, March 14th 2020, was my Last Normal Day. The day before — Friday the 13th! — I’d gone by Winter Hill Brewing Company as was my habit of a Friday, and on Saturday I walked down to Razors for a haircut. It was nice out.
I have been going back to my local on Mondays, when the wastewater numbers are low, because I’m as vaxed-up as I can currently get, I don’t live with anyone immunocompromised, and my calculation is that the risks are much more acceptable now than they were a couple years ago. So I don’t miss my bar quite as much as I used to, but I do miss not having to check on the ambient pandemic conditions before deciding whether to stroll on down to Magoun’s. I use rapid tests pretty regularly, I follow the BioBot data, I wear a mask whenever I’m going to be indoors around other people and not eating or drinking. So far so good, I’m still a no-vid, or at least an as-far-as-I-know-vid.
But hundreds to thousands of people are still dying of COVID in the US every week, and none of this had to be this way. A major federal program to incentivize and subsidize improved indoor air filtration and circulation in public indoor spaces would, alone, make a huge impact, but instead we get “guidelines” saying it’s totally fine for your employer to fire you if you try not to spread COVID to your coworkers to go back to work while you still have symptoms.
My friend Shafiqah Hudson, known to many on Twitter as @sassycrass, died last month. We never met in person, but we knew each other for a decade online. I deeply regret that, because I quit Twitter, we fell out of touch. She had a number of health problems, exacerbated by poor living conditions, but also exacerbated by long COVID, and she warned that it would, in the end, be the COVID that killed her. The New York Times ran an obituary for her, which is grim: had she received the kind of recognition she deserved from the mainstream media while alive, it’s likely she would still be with us. If you happen to see her name, you likely won’t see her described this way, because (among other, worse reasons) she wasn’t affiliated with a credentialed institution, but Fiqah was a disinformation researcher, not just “an activist” or (as the Times had it) someone who “fought trolls”. She recognized, brought attention to, researched, and documented the ways neonazis were organizing online to mount disinfo and harassment campaigns, and the tactics they employed in those campaigns. Neonazis exchanged messages trying to come up with a way to discredit her, personally, because she was so effective at disrupting their efforts. Other (white) journalists built whole careers on her findings, but rarely if ever credited her. She routinely pitched freelance stories, only to be rejected and then see the same outlet publish a similar piece by a white writer soon afterward. She suffered chronic health problems, poverty, and occasionally homelessness, and in the end she had to use social media to try to crowdfund enough to keep a roof over her head and pay her cab fare to the ER.
She was smart, and funny, and she had amazing stories from her younger days. She was only a little older than me. She was my friend, and she deserved to get old.
None of this had to be this way. We could still make it be a different way.
https://smadin.net/2024/03/14/i-miss-my-bar-pt-v-four-years-of-this/
