As daily covid death rate climb past 100% of a 9/11, it’s important to remember that there’s a reason this is being treated differently. It’s not even particularly mysterious.

It’s about power and fear. 1/ https://twitter.com/santiholley/status/1334550764820172802

You can’t invade covid and neutralize the threat. You can’t shoot it with a gun, or a missile, or send in a seal team. You can’t clusterbomb the village where its children live.

There is no fantasy of unaccountable state violence that will bring the virus under control. 2/

The thing that will work, the only thing that works, is to provide people with the things they need to stay fed, sheltered, and clean. It’s supporting the health care workers who are not Front Line Troops, and whose jobs never involve glorious, violent heroism. 3/

The things that get us out of this crisis are the things that allow us to care for each other, to give up things we want so that people we don’t know get things they need.

They are the things that blunt the edge of fear and desperation that all of us have grown used to. 4/

These things make us as normal-ass people more stable, and more resilient. That is precisely why they are unthinkable to the people who have us taking off our shoes and drinking 4-oz bottled water and drone-striking weddings because 3,000 people died 19 years ago. 5/

Because the War on Terror trained us to make peace with powerlessness, and gnawing fear, and insecurity, and humiliation, and a constant death toll we were assured we bore no ethical responsibility for.

The media it produced trains us to chuckle darkly at 3,000 deaths a day. 6/

And it trains other people to scream, spittle-flecked and maskless, at the existential threat of not being able to hang out with your friends at a bar. They, and us, have been taught the fear and sense of imminent doom. We’re just processing it differently. 7/

there was a moment after 9/11, before screaming white mobs smashed French wine bottles in the gutter, when the president of France declared “we are all Americans now.”

There was a moment where care and a sense of shared vulnerability were about to be the reaction to terror. 8/

And people have made more money than god driving the planet past the brink. They know that there is a possibility that the terror they have caused could lead to care, solidarity, mutual aid, and resilience.

And that is the scariest thing that their money can possibly imagine.