New Variants of envIrUSment Heartbreak and Grief
Let’s talk about the heartbreak and grieving process that comes with learning someone you thought would still be masking actually isn’t anymore.
I understand that most allistic people are unwilling to socially go against the grain because it means they will be seen as weird and otherwise could face real ostracization.
But it hurts, nonetheless.
The consequences of their ongoing envirusment conformity is killing us.
Learning that someone, who you thought would still be masking, actually doesn’t have the conviction to protect (especially, immunocompromised) lives is a new BIG red flag in relationships now. Especially, romantic ones where a person’s lack of PPE risks lover’s lives.
As I began discussing in my dissertation, another obvious thread I see connected to this is the lack of comprehensive sex education. These caving and lying behaviors people are doing regarding washing/masking status, and succumbing to pressure in moments, mimic sociosexual ones.
If someone doesn’t see (and/or is willfully ignorant) that not wearing a mask in in door spaces since March 2020 releases any number of possible contagions into a room that linger for hours, influencing their immediate environment, that has implications.
This is mass implemented evidence explicating that if something manifests as “invisible” (to the naked human eye), most United States citizens will act as if it doesn’t exist, and that they have no personal responsibility to ensure it stops damaging all our interconnected lives.
This cannot be divorced from the orientation, logics, and practicing patterns of colonial capitalism that leverages a mythical position of Objectivity, depersonalization, specialization, disconnection, standardization, among other themes, that incrementally birthed this C-19 era.
In my work, I’ve called this overarching phenomena the “mechanization of humans”, that I’m arguing is now being pushed (especially in our inflated sick, disabled, & dying COVID-19 age) into a “humanization of objects”. This is evidenced by sociosexual biomimetics and robots, etc.
Leading me to ask in my first Substack post: Are We Sick of Other Humans?