An Open Letter to All the Pandemic-Grown “Freedom Fighters”

(I’d like to thank the ever-growing anti-lockdown rallies, conspiracies and rhetoric for inspiring the following thoughts.)

Arbitrarily insisting on “personal rights” and prioritizing “the economy” over any possible individual or collective responsibility to other humans is a sad, predictable demonstration of self-interested privilege by folks who have clearly never experienced any kind of situational limitations, discomforts or inconveniences before.

I hate to break it to y’all, but poverty, suicides, despair, incredible economic losses and outright travesties have been a daily reality for masses of people since time began – it’s the nearly countless political oppressions of most facets of their human existence and rights, and their ongoing poverty that has systemically upheld all the socioeconomic “securities” to which you now cling, or which you’re losing, grieving and lamenting. (“I didn’t give a single fuck about any of that shit until that shit started fucking directly with me,” right?) The “us/them” dichotomy is over, folks – it’s just the assholery of people that discriminates, not viruses.

Willfully deciding that the communal “rules” of a global plague shouldn’t apply to you even when your “right” to go traipse through your world if, how and when you want to can literally cause someone to die – seriously? Don’t get me wrong – I hate government and unjust systems as much as you’ve now decided you do too, but not because “they’re gaslighting me with all this covid virus shit.”

I’m sorry to break it to you, Darlings – capitalism gaslit you all along, as evidenced by all your impressively organized tantrum-grade refusals to just accept this long-overdue dent in consumer-driven trappings, irrelevant and largely white, patriarchal constructs like “patriotism” and all the neoliberal class systems on which your individual comforts and benefits have ridden easy for oh so long.

Life really isn’t fair, is it? Uninvited loss and change is super painful and hard. I’m genuinely sorry it’s taken so long for these lessons to rear their ugly heads in your clearly very narrowly-concerned lives. I wouldn’t take any issue with your “fuck you I have rights” processing except that your decisions and behaviours – particularly when public spaces are involved – can actually cause others to, you know, suffer and/or die.

Thinking about the life-or-death wellness of others in the context of covid (and the overrun, under-resourced public health care systems in which exhausted and criminally underpaid healthcare workers are currently burning out en masse) isn’t the “sniveling weak fear” your memes and tropes gleefully depict – it’s giving a shit about other human beings you otherwise wouldn’t (and very possibly haven’t ever once before bothered to) give the time of day.

Other-centeredness can be inconvenient, especially when an unprecedented and potentially fatal contagion is literally hanging in the air molecules everyone on earth shares and breathes. Humane compassion is a real bitch.

I know I’m not alone in offering my sincere and heartfelt condolences for all the brutal hardships you’re personally coping with right now, and shittily enough (just like nearly everyone else on earth), will be coping with for the foreseeable future… before gently encouraging you to read/view/listen to some Noam Chomsky and/or Michael Parenti (for waaaaay better, more evidenced reasons to hate your government) and to otherwise grow the fuck up.

23 August 2020

Vancouver, BC Canada