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This is the single sickest, violent, and reprehensible story and headline I've read since perhaps the start of the pandemic. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-12/children-apologizing-to-parents-grandparents-spreading-coronavirus-into-families-as-l-a-county-reels
I'm so incoherent with rage that I can hardly type. This article is wrong and damaging on its own terms, but it also concentrates almost every failure of public health messaging into a single toxic box of poison.
CHILDREN. Whether or not the headline is true, children are supposedly being injected with the belief that they have killed their loved ones. How can anyone imbue them with a message so monstrous?! I was brought up in a climate of guilt and moralization that I'm still dismantling
But at least mine was about my relationship to the Holy Spirit and not about whether I was literally a murderer *by virtue of breathing in the presence of my family*.
Then we can note the sickening individualization of responsibility here, and how it's being transferred from one generation to another. Children, apparently, are to blame for having left the house and brought the virus into family gatherings hosted by ... whom, exactly?
But even that framing grants far too much. Statistics for California about the racial, ethnic, and occupation-differentiated impacts of the virus demonstrate that the culpable actors (in this sort of framing, which is better but not good enough) are rich white people (cont)
ordering takeout after voting for the various means by which housing supply is kept limited and expensive in the state. The two most obvious examples: line cooks and multigenerational households or congregate settings.
And the public health official quoted, who should be fired, thinks this is a good and helpful message for controlling the virus. Better scientists have shown a thousand times over that such messaging doesn't work and is even counterproductive.
If you blame people for getting sick, they'll avoid getting tested and isolating and naming contacts and all that jazz. We all know this and it's why activists fought for privacy re HIV- diagnoses and for housing and health support for those affected.
But I also want to talk for a moment about the implicit anthropology we see in its worst form here, though it circulates everywhere. The act that is being named killing is the act of being in the presence of another body. There is no conceivable, justifiable defense for that.
The act - being in the presence of another body - is itself quite literally the meaning of life, if life has any such thing.
And the presence we are taking about is not one of violence, but of love and care. Why the fuck do these people think people gather with their families?! Right now, we are under the dominion of a virus that invisibly, unknowingly, spreads from one of us to the other.
But only sometimes. In fact, not even that frequently relative to the numbers infected. Most of the time, infected people don't transmit and many don't transmit at all. So we're supposed to treat every interaction as if it were a matter of life and death even though most aren't.
Plenty to say about the vision of mastery and decision-making encoded there, which is preposterous even for adults. But for children?! It is violence pure and simple.
Public health's duty is to people. It is to the well-being of people, thought broadly. It is as much to the *life, not survival* that we're fighting to protect in the devastating, costly sacrifices we're making.
Sacrifices necessitated not by the actions of children but of culpable agents (politicians, public health officials, "the economy") and of amoral, non-culpable agential non-agents (evolution, contact between humans and animals, viruses).
The no return to normal I want to fight for is everything that this headline and article presents to us under the banner of the good. This is evil, nothing less.
The ways in which we aren't in this together are utterly obscured by this article. The ways in which we are, are too. We must fight for the pleasure and risk and danger and possibility that is love and conflict and antagonism and *life with others*.
(Including analyzing not just the violence of this article but the violence it engenders in me, and the irreconcilability of such violences.)
