GREY RUBBLE - GREEN SHOOTS

it's just gotten a lot more obvious bc of people's reactions when it comes to covid/masking, even when they aren't overtly hostile. it actually feels more insidious when people pretend to be considerate by way of asserting the individualistic lib tagline of 'only high risk people have to worry about it, so they can choose to protect themselves :) i respect their choice to mask <3' effectively absolving themselves of any responsibility and shutting down the conversation under the guise of Reasonable Compromise. (as if disabled people don't have to go out in public too, as if they don't need safe healthcare, as if they don't have the right to community and a fulfilling life like everyone else, as if our lives are too inconvenient/not important enough to fight for. not even getting into the fact that if they've had covid even ONCE, they are also High Risk, and its literally only a matter of time before they find themselves disabled too 💀 no one wants to consider themselves vulnerable or Like Those Useless Rejects of Society).

Masks have been identified as the visual trigger for a problem, not the solution to multiple pressing public health issues.

To please right wing elements in the desperate hope of stealing *checks notes* fascist support for an openly fascist party, the center-right Democrats in the US with Joe Biden as their figurehead worked to downplay the continued necessity of masking even as studies on viral genetics find that vax-only methods for controlling covid cause more rapid and effective viral immune escape to become dominant, does little to actually prevent spread of the illness (especially in enclosed spaces), and has showed that doctors are willing to toe a political line instead of following scientific and medical best practices for halting the spread of a communicable disease which is still killing more Americans than breast and prostate cancer combined.

People who refuse to mask in public spaces, stay home when sick, use tests, or otherwise refuse to take covid seriously as a public health threat have shifted politically to the right.

People who mock and belittle those still taking precautions have adopted political positions identical to the "cough in my mouth" pandemic deniers of 2020 and are pushing full blown eugenics about who should be allowed to safely navigate public life.

"Has been" implies a past tense, an end to the pattern. Masking *contines* to be politicized. A public health tool has been narratively relegated to the bin of "public health tools that don't work" as it continues to be roped in with ideas like enforced distancing and face shields to prevent the spread of airborne illness.

Public health agencies refuse to take the scientifically confirmed threat of aerosols spread just by breathing seriously, pushing handwashing as the number one prevention for illnesses that can linger on poorly ventilated indoor air for dozens of minutes to dozens of hours given the right conditions.

This is a global effort to deny responsibility for a continuing crisis as covid continues to spread and long covid rates have skyrocketed, especially in children where the condition has surpassed asthma as the leading chronic illness in children. This is a failure by medicine to keep up with science and remain apolitical. This is a failure of public health to act in the defense of all. This is the normalization of fascist eugenics in daily life.

"Masks have been politicized" is trying to say ^ all of that ^

Mexican Mole Lizard (Bipes biporus), family Bipedidae, Baja California Sur, México

I think it's because you're afraid to care.