One ongoing concern at this here blog is the course and nature of what we could call "damage" sustained on human societies contemporaneously. Though the damage takes place along a spectrum, with more kinetic forms continuing to exist in current war zones, there are also slower, multifaceted, and quiet forms which continue on with a heightened insidiousness, which produce the more kinetic and concentrated forms, which despite their geographically remote and concentrated nature, nevertheless feed back into the less kinetic forms, advancing them all the same. Understanding this damage is crucial to understanding and anticipating the arc of decline in industrial age societies, and we'll continue to get deeper into that subject as per usual.
In this case, I'm grateful that Ian Welsh has stayed on the subject of Covid damage since the very beginning, as this is a tricky and complex process that is made even more complicated by heavy propagandizing in the press and in our political economy.
As Ian describes - and the chart he links to is astounding - wave after wave of Covid infection has steadily ground down the population's immune response, among many other things, which results in a grinding merry-go-round of secondary infections, all of which produce additional heavy damage throughout society on multiple levels. I'd suggest reading this post as well, which taken together with the Covid piece, carries the implication that damage and leadership are related and influence each other, as Ian mentions.
This is personal for me. As I sit here writing, I'm slightly out of breath and quite achey. My Long Covid has largely healed. I've gotten away from the fire, and it no longer actively burns, but the scars are still there, and occasionally they still hurt. I haven't been the same. And like the archetypal burn victim, I'm quite wary of the fire: even distant and suggestive glimpses of it are enough to activate my early defenses and put me on alert.
Now, roughly 5 years after the start of the Covid pandemic, Covid is everywhere, and anecdotally (with regular observations of national policy and messaging) very few people care to track it or even mitigate or take the slightest precaution that actually works. I still hear people going on with, "Don't worry we've wiped down all the surfaces with bleach and are being really careful." Huh? Not even a year into the pandemic, we knew it was in the air and that you had to clean the fucking air. And that is one thing we refuse to do.
Even further, here in Southern California, the air quality is worse than I've ever seen it. There is a perpetual build-out and population growth - more cars and wider freeways - and geography and climate conditions have led to a capping effect in which the Los Angeles basin traps all of the smog and holds it in, with the result of lingering garbage air and constant smog alerts and burn bans. Are we doing anything on a large scale about ventilation and sick buildings at the very least? Might not be able to contain those local growth engines, and we might not be able to muster the coordination, trust, and purpose it takes to build out mass transit. Folks have forgotten the lessons of the 60's and 70's and the smog alerts, and all of the heart disease and cancers and cognitive dysfunction and other maladies that come from that. And of course, all of this is also hard on immune systems, bringing on more Covid, which brings on more secondary infections, and we get more and more tired and brittle and hand-wavey about the bare minimum mitigation.
I get it, bleach is cheap and air purification, ventilation, and HVAC are expensive, and the virus is everywhere and they just aren't trying anymore, so what is the average person to do? But even low-cost mitigation and effort can't be bothered with. We are collectively sleep-walking into the miasma and then steadily ground-down.
All of the messaging has overwhelmingly downplayed aerosol dynamics and structural environmental mitigation, and emphasized surface cleaning, distancing, and personal responsibility. Here, Fela Kuti's Zombie comes to mind, with anti-police and anti-military messaging that could be readily transferred to a more generalized population group, following orders, or mass propaganda, and marching on, rotting away all the while.
Setting aside the personalized venting here, I don't necessarily mean for this to be a finger-wagging moral condemnation either. People are exhausted. Large-scale problem solving measures, or even basic mitigation, simply can't be done as a matter of failed capacity and functionality. This is what the damage looks like and feels like on a social and subjective level.
