#61 - I’m so mad about the MTA dropping their mask mandate

28 people a day are dying of covid in new york city and our governor just dropped the mask mandate.

no.

not dropped.

mocked the idea that they ever existed at all.

she tweeted a parody of what i believe to be the best public health messaging that was ever available to new yorkers.

this poster was one of the only things that made me feel better in the first few months of the pandemic.

we take care of each other. we help each other. we are humans together trapped in this tiny tube hurtling through the underground in one of the most densely populated and most exciting cities in the world.

the masks have been disappearing for a while now on the subway. i go fewer places than ever before. i walk everywhere i can.

there's a vaccine that’s more effective than the initial mrna model that pfizer and moderna offer, but it keeps having issues with contamination, so it’s not being made on a wide scale. it’s actually really important that their shareholders have another banner year.

it’s like they think growth is exponential. it’s like they don’t remember that their customers are dying. dead people don’t need vaccines, or advil.

who will they sell to when we’re not here?

why does nancy need another home? why is she…daytrading? dr. oz wasn’t satisfied with his millions from television and evading the ftc trials that attempted to indite him for selling green coffee beans that (didn’t) help people lose weight and now he’s embarrassing himself at wegner’s.

they can’t feed their children in britain. there is an energy crisis on the horizon that was deemed less important than the death of a 96 year old who never paid taxes. they will spend millions on her funeral, sacrifice their economy, and for what? the divine right of kings?

(they’re flying the flags at half-mast here too, the actual only thing that will cause the founding fathers to roll over in their graves.) (well that and the treason being committed by a certain tangerine tinged former president.) (it’s like, the only thing they wrote in the constitution we should definitely like kill someone over betrayal of the state meanwhile the doj is like ‘pleeeease give them back we really didn’t want to have to go to florida to get them, it’s so humid in the summer down there )-: just give them back and we won’t say anything, even about that coup you attempted’.)

there was an active shooter in uvalde on the first day back to school. there were news articles celebrating a child that wore a shirt with the faces of his slain classmates. those cops sleep at night, i guess. convinced that there was nothing more they could have done, that their lives were more important. we’re told we don’t understand how hard it is to have their job—but their job is to put their life on the line.

that’s what the moneys for.

(there are gangs within the lapd that initiate via murder. they have tattoos. they’re easily identifiable white supremacists and they are being paid for with california’s tax dollars.) (they’re writing articles claiming that the dems have to drop ‘defund the police’ from their stump speeches. there’s nothing to remove—no democratic candidate is calling for that. ‘reallocate the overswollen police budgets to social services that actually provide community care’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it.)

(eric adams, cop mayor, told everyone to tweet him photos of cops standing around looking at their phones on the subway. he then had to ask people to stop because he received too many. they plan to increase police presence to beat fare evasion. i got an idea for how to beat fare evasion. make. it. free.)

the current sitting governor of new york only has the job because the previous occupant couldn’t stop abusing his power. he lied about the death tallies in nursing homes and then wrote a book about what a good governor he was. when women started coming forward about his sexual harassment, he put together a power point of all the times he had been photographed kissing them (against their will) and blamed it on being italian. the time’s up women’s empowerment group funded his lawyers. and for once, the nepo baby was held barely accountable and removed from the highest office in the state. but don’t worry, reporters still to this day call him up and ask for his opinions. as if they fucking matter.

(i am so tired of women having to rip themselves open and display their most vulnerable moments for us to believe they have value, merit, that there is something sinister in these men we seek to avail. show me a woman who has gained anything but strife in trying to protect us from men who seek to harm. there is a rapist on the supreme court. the woman who came forward about him had to go into hiding. but she still came forward. it was deemed suspicious that her lifes work was relevant to the case. as if the apparency of cause and effect was not immediate to every woman who learned about it. then again, anita hill only got an apology for what happened to her because the guy most responsible for her defamation wanted to be president.)

and then they promoted kathy.

kathy hochul, who allocated $500 million of new yorks budget to be spent rebuilding the buffalo bills stadium, because it makes perfect sense for the state to fund the construction of a private sports arena that does nothing to benefit or provide free services to the public. oh, that’s right. her husband works for them. and where did she find that magic money in a state budget that is notoriously shrinking and taking the education system down with it? oh that’s right. she stole it from native american casino owners who operate on sovereign land.

she tweeted, in mockery of mask mandates. in a state with one of the single highest death tolls in the country.

i thought it ended there, but they actually put them in the subway.

i could cry, i could cry, i could cry.

there must be an adult left in the room with some semblance of self and decency. but i don’t think there is. you don’t just steal classified documents, you’re forced to take them. gee, i wonder what could be held over someone’s head to make them commit major espionage. if only someone had a…dossier of evidence as to what that might be.

madison cawthorne was ousted from congress when he spilled the beans on being invited to the orgy. he actually believed in all the shit he was saying, and that terrified the old guard who only pretend in those hallowed halls. (ted cruz went to Princeton, he is the elite. he also bought 100 cans of soup the first week of his marriage, and then his wife returned all the soup because she saw it as an affront to her womanly duties or something, but ol’ ted got mad that she returned the soup, so she…went back to the store and repurchased 100 cans of soup. i bet her arms were sore. did she eat the soup too? i have so many questions.) anyway, a friend proposed that maybe the orgies are where people gather the blackmail and honestly you’ll never ever convince me otherwise now.

(why were there eight congressional republicans celebrating the fourth of july in moscow in 2018? we know why. because putin loves to be a bully. he’s got shit on them, and we know it. it’s laughable to think otherwise. he does this on purpose. russia is playing the long game.)

it’s so much worse than we think. and it feels heartening to know that we can still come together, that unions are popping up, it’s feeling like a kaufman & hart play in here lately. i’m glad the people feel empowered. i hope they feel empowered enough to take down the monarchy. i hope we regulate the fuck out of the internet. i hope jeff bezos’s mega-yachts sink. i hope there is a future, instead of fascism being repackaged and sold back to us on channels we were led to believe were leftist. the media is abandoning us and hedging their bets on becoming the state’s favorite little darling propaganda machines. i don’t know where to go for news, because no one seems to be treating the cdc guidelines as legitimate, because manhattan is actually just run by the real estate companies who insist that we must go back to the office because otherwise the city will cease to be profitable for them, and who cares if people die what about the shareholder buyback profit scheme christmas bonus??

(bezos quote tweeted a black professor at carnegie mellon who tweeted that she didn’t care about the death of a colonizer. a wave of harassment followed, including a statement by the institution she works for throwing her under the bus. amazon subsidizes their computer science academy. we’re in hell.) (though i guess i shouldn’t be surprised that the university named for two robber barons would kowtow to the robber barons of today.) (the harassment of black women is actually a textbook way to get a foothold into politics, particularly professors and other luminaries. it’s a playbook. it’s almost like nothing has changed since reagan showed up at the nashoba county fair. in fact, they may have gotten worse.)

i’m so mad about the mask mandates being dropped. it’s like, really not that hard to wear a mask. i don’t know how there are people who force starbucks baristas to call them merry christmas and yet those same people have their delicate sensibilities stifled by a little strip of cloth. like, get over it? it’s a mask? in a deadly pandemic? during the spanish flu everyone actually all got over themselves and wore them all the time—and a lot of those same people did not have access to indoor plumbing. we need to stop babying americans, and the world. it’s actually okay to be a little uncomfortable on the subway for five minutes if you get a little sweaty behind the mask. the virus you may catch otherwise could lead to long lasting lung and neurological damage. (so many people have lungs that don’t work at full capacity. especially if you live in this city, where the air quality is famously not great.)

28 people a day are dying in new york city, and our leaders are spitting on their graves. we need a leader who is willing to actually lead. it’s great that ‘ol joe has got some pep in his step, really leaning into his ‘let bartlet be bartlet’ era. but he did photoshoots, maskless, while diagnosed. he leaned into showing that you should still go back to work, even though we know that doctors recommend rest. and he did it to what…show the people who aren’t going to like him anyway that he’s not too old to lead?

teachers are quitting in droves, schools are still not properly ventilated because everyone has to see what they can get out of government contracts that should be designed for safety and not profitability. profits are fucking stupid when there aren’t going to be enough people left to buy the products!! school was already in steep decline, bush made sure of that. kids aren’t taught how to think, they’re taught how to understand what answers a test is asking for. (in my high school, we were told to write as much as possible and fill the page for every long form answer because one of our teachers had been an official test grader™ and knew all the tricks. we regularly had the highest scores in the state.) the american education system was set up to produce factory workers, but then we uh, got rid of the factories.

businesses are made of people. not shareholders. laborers. people, it’s people all the way down. we can blame it on some nebulous understanding of the structure that the robber barons decided was best, but at the end of the day, we used to make chairs to last generations and no one was trying to create forced obsolitism because the quality was what the company was known for. i can be a more mindful consumer at the grocery store, but wouldn’t it be better if we regulated the packaging available? feels like there’s much more positive impact if frito-lay stopped using plastic rather than me by myself, y’know?

we take care of each other. that was the message. new yorkers give a shit about their neighbors because we’re all on top of each other. we wear masks because we care, we demonstrably want to keep each other safe. i don’t want you to get sick, i want you to be here tomorrow, i want you to live. and it’s so simple to wear a mask, usually caring takes some effort, masks take so little. they should have been available, for free, everywhere. just like testing. just like the vaccines actually were. whenever this country says they can’t afford it i’m going to start demanding they militarize the operation because those fuckers sure have enough money to spare, right? they’ve got doctors, get the corps going.

you do you.

you do you says the sign, with the mask just over the nose. it’s fine. it’s fine that you don’t care, it’s fine that you’re too cool for a mask, it’s fine that you’ve decided that this ongoing deadly continually mutating virus isn’t a big deal. we get it. you do you.

respect each others choices. as if the choice of wearing a mask is equivalent to choosing not to. as if one choice doesn’t negate the efficacy of the other. we’re all in this together, but not anymore. we politicized medical advice. oops.

(i don’t know where to go for medical advice i actually trust because it’s all being run through a capitalistic filter. landlords received subsidies and we were placated for months that a rent freeze would be coming, would be discussed, would be possible. it never came. i don’t even think they had a written proposal.)

(‘placate, placate. they’ll forget. or die.’)

the thing is, i’m going to have to vote for hochul soon, because her opponent is a dude who staged an attack so that he could pretend that the guy he hired to attempt to stab him with a cat head anti-rape keychain got out on cash bail, because cash bail is the actual problem. and democratic leaders are bullshit, because they’re actually just proto-republicans. we kept moving the middle farther and farther right, so now the democratic base is floating wayyyy outside of where the ‘moderate’ position is. somehow they did it, they really managed to create a party of socially liberal (lipservice at best but still) and fiscally conservative (because nancy can’t stop daytrading!) (also her son runs a pac but no no, don’t look over there) and now 70% of americans want common sense gun control and believe people have the right to bodily autonomy and our leaders are hemming and hawing because if they actually give us those things they have to figure out new platforms to run on, and that seems really hard since they have to spend so much of their time fundraising so that they can remain in a job they are woefully ineffective at. addicted to power and completely useless.

(it’s kind of like how non-profits don’t actually want to dismantle structures and fix things, because then they’d be rendered unnecessary.)

look, i even made a little graphic to explain what it used to look like when it came to politics (you campaign towards the opposing ends of the spectrum to appeal to the base, and then you become more moderate once elected was the theory) and how now because of the shifted middle, it’s a lot easier to appeal for republicans to appeal to their entire base, while democrats are stuck trying to appeal to folks who are for more liberal than most (and especially, career) politicians could ever hope to be.

of course i feel unsatisfied, i’m to the left of progressive, there is literally no candidate that aligns with my shit because they’re all vested in continuing a capitalist system that i feel like i keep flapping my arms and going ‘but it’s killing people’ and they just kind of shrug in response. there are more of us than there are of them but we’re stuck with these two parties of the do-nothing crews because they’re actually there to mostly collect checks. and the ones that aren’t are drowned out, because actually i do want to know what the ceo of chase bank (started by robber baron j.p. morgan) would tell a full-time employee who works for him yet is still below the poverty line while he has a base salary of over $30 million. for what? he’s going to die, no matter how many houses he owns, he will perish. he will cease to be. and you can’t take it with you. is there a secret doctrine that says heaven is just your favorite vacation home that i don’t know about?? is this like the mormon thing where wives become moons and the more moons a man has the higher up he is considered in the afterlife in which…mormons become planets? (still not entirely clear on that tbh.) but the woman who works for him, who goes to work and does her best and can’t afford to live comfortably will die sooner, because financial stress is actually the most stressful kind of stress, and it never goes away.

divorce rates would go down if people had money, but the party that claims family values is actually deeply backed by an organization that believes in the cult of the individual and jesus as the individual above all else. they believe the purpose of women is to serve men. they run a little thing called the national prayer breakfast. a thing our supposedly secular leader shows up and eats pancakes at every year.

idk, it’s corruption. but like, maybe we should elect some people who actually give a shit. maybe democrats could stop investing in far right campaigns and instead codify voting rights so that voting is easy and beto could actually win texas because despite the vanity fair cover bungle, maybe he really is born to be in it. i believe him, i think he at least really does hate guns as much as i do, he’s at least willing to state on record that he wants to take them away. (es grande.)

i wanted writing this to feel cathartic, i want to feel like i’m not just willfully misinterpreting the world as abjectly cruel. but i don’t know another word for how this all feels. i don’t know why no one will hold these leaders accountable to, you know, fucking lead.

idk, i think my best friend only dating people who vote is one of the best forms of direct action i’ve ever seen so maybe we all just need to follow her lead a little bit more. (don’t fuck people who don’t vote in the midterms. demand they have policy positions they can articulate beyond parroting. make giving a shit cool again.)

there are more of us, there are so many of us who want better and more, who would love to feel secure in the knowledge that there is a future, and that the oil companies don’t get to steal it from us. they can maximize their profits all they want but what’s there to spend it on when the earth as we know it ceases to be?

you can’t take it with you.

but we can be kind to each other while we’re here.

so.

more of that.

please.