Has COVID-19 revealed our systematic sickness of each other?
…everywhere we look — from public proclamations to the most private aspects of our lives — one phenomena seems to have manifested itself clearer than ever: we want to wash our hands of each other…
Updated October 2nd, 2022
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John Paul Sartre once said “Hell is other people”.
Nowadays, his expression is being sold in the form of many enticing novelties. From biomimetic sextech devices, to futuristically promising humanoid intelligent AI sex robot “companions”, and even masturbatory condoms equip with cleansing wipes to solve the (apparently?) inconvenient sexual mess of ejaculation.
In response to COVID-19, more official sources, like the CDC, have similarly become emboldened enough to suggest “gloryholes” as a solution to the terminally inhumane conditions we’ve all been thrust into. It’s the sexual equivalent of pulling up to a drive through and ordering “one blow job”, with as little personal association as humanly possible. All jokes aside, many of us are into that kind of thing, so no kink-shame intended. And, it makes sense in a world where we’re now engaging in sexual activity without other humans more than ever before.
My point is, it seems that everywhere we look — from public proclamations to the most private aspects of our lives — one phenomena seems to have manifested itself clearer than ever: we want to wash our hands of each other — and to the fullest extent possible!
This may sound like a bold claim. However, on closer examination, how can we truly feign surprise at this suggestion anymore? Socially-distant COVID-19 life has crystallized for us the tenants that we have been taught. That “the other” is a sickness we must cleanse our surfaces of.
And, why wouldn’t we believe it? We’d be sick, disabled, or dead not to! I mean the cold hard statistics speak for themselves. Since March 2020 — alone — over 1 million Americans (and counting!) have died from some semblance of human contact. Around 30% of folks who have contract COVID-19 are developing long-COVID, a disability we know very little about, while around 50% of folks six months after even a mild case are experiencing neurological abnormalities.
After having lived through a death toll and general mass disabling event like that, what else could the masses now be perceived as, but an irreconcilable disease we must socially distance ourselves from for safety?
For these reasons, among many others, hasn’t it now become “rational” to accept that the costs of our messy humanness are ones we might never recover from? Having now taken the temperature of this cold, sick, yet, hot take, I’d actually like to suggest to readers an even messier future.
On a more personal note, I have now endured thirty hellish months of this present pandemic world. In this time, alongside watching the inexcusable acts of police brutality and murder, responses of righteous civil unrest, I also experienced the loss my mother to lung cancer in August 2020. And, if that wasn’t enough, this all happened, concurrently, while I finished my PhD program in Media & Communication and taught numerous college courses.
All things considered, while doing so, I’ve frequently wondered about our societal definition and acceptance of who has been granted the privilege to be seen as “human” (think: the Enlightenment able-bodied, White, cishet, rich, male). Moreover, I’ve developed a fascination with our aversion to the many times unspeakable things humanness begets.
In pursuit of these ends, I have begun to curiously explore how our sociohistorical concepts of “humanness” have constrained and revealed our abilities to live our own “dirty” lives around others theoretically built walls of mythical and impossibly up-kept ideals of cleanliness.
Most recently, like many other artists, critical scholars, activists, and public intellectuals, I’ve been concerning myself with ways in which we might build bridges and doors towards a future of — embracing — rather than sanitizing and disinfecting our inherent states of being away.
For anyone who knows me, the anxiety-ridden self-proclaimed neurodivergent germaphobe that I am, on the surface these research endeavors probably appear to be a massively hypocritical undertaking. Instead of considering that a limitation, I would invite you to forgive my very human hypocrisy (and, perhaps, also your own while reading this?); instead allowing me to raise the following scenario for your consideration:
Lately, countless public figures have played make believe in anticipation of various hypothetical post-COVID-19 futures. The more it happens, the more it seems as if they do this in attempts to enchant said worlds into actual existence. Regrettably, and to no avail, no glorious COVID-19-less future has arrived like magic. Only more deadly days of compounding present-COVID-19 injustices.
This is why, in attempts to finally release all of this prolonged narrative societal edging, I would like offer a set of three questions for consideration. Each one addressing an increasingly more intimidating and face threatening phantasmic future.
First: “If and when a post-COVID-19 time arrives, will immunocompromised and otherwise disabled folks ever be able to accept and know how to embrace another person without fear again?”
Second: “Will immunocompromised and/or otherwise disabled folks ever again be allowed the grace to be unabashedly human in this world, where they have learned that others exhalations elicit harbingers of their demise?”
And, with anticipatory answers to the former two questions in mind, finally:
“How do we preemptively reconcile the nuances of our present-COVID-19 world in ways that protect those whose immunities pervasively mark them as vulnerable to the sicknesses of our own human conditions?”
I want to be humane and transparent: I don’t have perfect scientific hypothesis circulating around any of these questions. But what I do have is an entire dissertation about sexual ecologies in the pre- and present-COVID-19 algorithmic age — full of digitally mediated ruminations and piecemeal insights about the documentations of these happenings.
Namely, what I’ve been observing is that our various physical, digital, and algorithmic realities have sent us frantically rollercoastering through loopdy-loops of materialistic spectacle — for so long now — the most of us seem to wear and speak fluently in disillusion and/or delusions.
Anyone I talk to anymore (especially those who are the most marginalized!) is desperately paddling to remain above the surface in an ongoing hellscape of viruses, late stage neoliberal capitalism, and the climate crises it inhumanely exacerbates.
If my observations are true, who have we been fooling in pretending COVID-19 is over, but ourselves? Because, look around. We’re all clearly drowning, while still pretending we’re swimming.
The current (time) is like a wave pool — we have all been thrown into — whether we like it or not. And, to make these fluid matters more gruesome, our dog whistle touting government appointed life guards have made it clear to us: they are not here for — and have zero plans to — ever save us.
Hence why, it’s in all of our best interests to climb out of ideological allegiance with the neoliberal capitalist hell hole we’re all drowning in, and instead continue working to resuscitate our dying national body.