Fine-tuning the potential emotional impact of risk is not the same as managing it.

Calm-mongering often promotes a false sense of security, a “moral calm” that hinders risk mitigation by clouding our judgement with dubious reassurances. Throughout the ongoing pandemic, two US administrations (and public health agencies worldwide) have focused on manufacturing consent for the repeated infections, as a public health strategy of some sort.

On the other side of the vaccine-only strategy, there is no plan B. There are no masks, no mitigations; there’s no plan, and no plan to make a plan.

Instead, the approach is one of denial, misinformation, hiding data, stripping resources, privatizing vaccines and medications, and turning those who (believe they) can play “back to normal” against those who simply cannot. “Herd immunity” has been redefined to mean … well, what exactly does it mean, in the context of the entire population being reinfected over, and over, and over again? To pundits it’s a shorthand for “most people have already had COVID before.” To politicians it’s an applause line equivalent to “COVID is over.” To the public, it just means, “I don’t have to care anymore.”

As in the case of the Spanish flu, the Covid pandemic seems to have been erased; we are no longer moved by a death toll which far surpasses even the violent wars that have cloaked our country in death.

We are, both politically and individually, committed to denial as a first line of defense against reckoning with our conditions. And though the pandemic’s initial eruption insisted on recognition for a short window, we returned to numbness at the first opportunity. This prolonged numbness is where our [world] finds itself today.

Part of what it means to have a right to bodily autonomy is that we are not forced to choose between our health and our participation in public life.

The political cover-up of Covid constitutes one of the greatest public health failures of the last century, a failure in a long line of failures so egregious that the overthrow of the state starts looking like the conservative position. It is a dereliction of some of the core duties of the polis: to safeguard public health, to disseminate true and timely information, to achieve collectively what is impossible to achieve individually. We should do more than blame our institutions — we should burn them down.

We can blame institutions, and we should. But we can also blame individuals for what they refuse to know, the ways in which they refuse to care.

Pandemic ignorance is deeply intertwined with an ableist system which allocates resources, power, status, and life itself differently according to the perceived ability or disability of each individual.

Widespread pandemic ignorance doesn’t just exist as a gap in our collective knowledge, waiting to be filled once the relevant discoveries are made. No, this gap has been filled with a substantive not-knowing, a cartoon of what kind of illness Covid is...“Covid is just like a cold!” “Kids don’t get Covid!” This is an ignorance that has something to say. It is an ignorance that can’t stand itself, so it fills in the gaps and declares itself knowledge.

The very invocation of the idea of “vulnerable people” marks a resurgence of the old ableist ideology, which separates the “normal” from the “vulnerable” as if vulnerability were not the essence of the human condition.

Despite society’s best efforts, Covid continues to insist on the interconnection of all beings. Covid waves continue, infections mount, and this tiny virus reminds us every day that each of us exists as what philosopher Arne Naess terms, “knots in the biospherical net.” If you pull on this net anywhere, ripples extend everywhere, each knot the intersection of tendrils that go on forever.

This vulnerability is both our greatest weakness and our greatest strength; it is what ableist domination tries, with all of its force and violence, to deny; and it is one of the sparkling truths that disabled people have tried to get the world to see, if only it had the courage to look.

Most of us couldn’t bear to face the ways that we failed one another as the pandemic raged on; we preferred the disappointing myth of powerlessness over the harsh reality of our own indifference.

I accepted the terrible fact that the pandemic was going to continue indefinitely and was not merely an event in my life but rather the container in which the rest my life would take place. This was a difficult reckoning.

Instead of accepting that the pandemic continued on, that we failed to contain it and so would need to incorporate its ongoing reality into the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, many people instead transformed the fantasy of after into their reality.

After the pandemic, after the lockdowns, after our world ruptured. They erected a finish line just in time for them to run through it. And as they ran through it, celebrating the fictional end of an arduous journey, they simultaneously invented a new before. This is the invention of memory.