I’m honestly disheartened with many leftists that do not mask. I have had otherwise great people just completely fail the covid protection litmus test, and it’s harrowing. I’m tired of being socially ostracized for masking and treated like I have the plague by the greater capitalist hellscape, to see other comrades not even take into account masking is truly ugh.
I get it that’s hard to accept, idk, giving up your (unprotected, so most) of your social life because you wear a respirator and that you will have to do it forever, but for me it ties in with the otherwise completely scientific ML analysis I have of the world.
I just wish it didn’t feel that isolating, even among communists, regarding such a basic fact about bodily consent and empathy and overall survival in capitalism. As proletarians, we don’t have expensive private healthcare, so it’s even more important to not get sick, yet I see people promoting the vax-and-forget rhetoric…
It’s so dissapointing, how am I supposed to organize with people, when everyone else treats you like the plague for engaging in prevention mechanisms with Covid? I go outside and if not harassed I get treated like a weird outcast, which I am used to because of my politics, but I really do not see how to enagage with such people.
It should not be controversial to say “it is now always raining, and we need to take umbrellas everywhere,” but it is and it is across every political tendency. This is the new normal no matter what anyone says, and they’ll be forced to confront sooner or later that getting sick is bad, actually, and there are very accessible things to be done about it indeed on an individual level that can grow to institutional and systemic change. The latter will not happen without the former. The world changed in 2020 and we are not changing with it. That is a recipe for disaster.
This is 100% the correct, materialist analysis, yes.
I don’t, not anymore, except maybe to poke holes in their flimsy reasoning to the extent that my mental capacity allows at any one time. Imani Barbarin says that her politics are “the disabled,” and that’s where I’ve landed after all of this. To any “leftist,” “communist,” whatever that tries to tell me they’re building the revolution without a mask, I say “good luck, chum” and leave. Their movement is doomed, and eventually they will figure that out or they will die. I am determined to survive either way and no one is going to stop me.
N95s are expensive and everywhere has stopped selling them anyway. I’d love to wear a mask outside - but I can’t.
No. There are packages of 440 surplus on Amazon for less than 40 dollars that are resold by medical suppliers due to being unused or close to expiry (which does not mean they don’t still function, only that the elastic may be weakened and decaying). This is what my family uses because we live in poverty. We don’t get sick anymore. There is no excuse.
We don’t know what the situation for acquiring masks is like outside the US though.
A couple of studies showing that expired masks typically work just fine and it’s the straps that fail.
Here’s a CDC study on face seal/fit testing of masks in longterm storage long past expired.
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/137515
And this is on the filtration performance from some of those same stockpiles.
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/181855
That’s right, thank you for the corroborating links. I was assuming this poster is in the US; I can’t speak for elsewhere. I am simply distrustful of “I can’t do it because it’s expensive” when my family has lived on less than ~$20k USD yearly in the equivalent of low-income subsidized apartments for the last 3 years and we make use of these stockpiles. Unless one is actually homeless and destitute or living in the periphery, treated with the severity the disease deserves, there are resources available, and I have very little grace remaining after 6 years.
Updated my journal