I Was There 6: "Make America Healthy Again" They Say...

This article split off from an extended tangent I went on in another article that I’ll link once it’s completed. If you’re wondering where I Was There 5 is, it’s going to remain private for the time being.

When pandemics happen, eugenicist policy always gets a boost. In the aftermath of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, the KKK had a revival. I learned about that in the book “More Deadly Than War” by Kenneth C. Davis. It covers the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic in good detail. In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, we also are seeing this with the rise of “You Do You” COVID policies and the general acceptance of getting COVID as a part of life for most of the general populace. These effectively cut disabled people out of public life by making any indoor public environment an infection risk for us and when you’re vulnerable, any risk of a setback has to be minimized, especially when you’re more severely ill. The eugenicist policies set in fast too. In the UK, over 500 disabled and elderly people were placed on DNR there’s even a case of someone being pressured to sign a DNR and eventually dying from it. Here's an article backing me up. Those policies only protect the bottom line of corporations and the feelings of the public who don’t want to acknowledge their own mortality by putting a mask back on. I’m surprised that people don’t make more. For me, it’s a minor daily inconvenience that protects me from the much fucking larger inconvenience of getting sick with something as nasty as COVID. I get to dodge pollen allergies, smoke inhalation if there’s a wildfire, plus whatever other various airborne illnesses that are floating around. The other week I put my KN-95 on just because I was cutting fabric and the dust was making me sneeze. My only regret about masking is not doing it more. A well-fitting mask will protect your lungs from airborne particles beyond just viruses. It’ll protect you from pollen, smoke, and even tear gas, plus it makes you harder to identify. I have the privilege of living in a place without a mask ban (for now), and where nobody really cares if I wear a mask. I don’t experience harassment for it, but I know other people have.

Due to the ongoing and widespread public health failure that is the world’s current response to COVID-19, most people can expect to be infected with COVID once every year. I cannot understate how big of a fucking disaster is. We know what COVID does to the body now. This is a genocide of the disabled and chronically ill, which will soon be everyone due to Long COVID from repeat COVID infections. Anti-science and eugenicist attitudes have blended together to form the modern “Make America Healthy Again” movement and what they're gonna do is pretty obvious to me. They're gonna pull support to a marginalized community, then blame them when they begin to suffer. After that they use it as an excuse to further crack down on us because we're supposedly "out of control". The "Grow organic food and get off your meds/drugs" camps will start as just that, but there will be a crackdown and more and more people will be forced into them as time goes on. Honestly, I won’t go through the exact chain of events that will cause them to evolve into this and just cut to the chase because apparently a lot of people aren’t seeing this and unknowingly perpetuating the claim that they are anything but the mass incarceration facilities of a repressive regime. Hitler had the concentration camps, Stalin had the gulags, and Trump will have these fucking things. Mark my words, when the bird flu blows up, the symptoms will be pathologized as being “unpatriotic” or some such excuse and people will be sent into these to basically act as bioweapons and infect everyone, not to mention the unmitigated COVID spread that will happen. This is where the mass sterilizations and worse will happen. I say again, this is a genocide of the disabled and chronically ill, which will become everyone, thanks to the disastrous COVID response we’re enduring.

For those who are most reliant on modern science for survival, any form of anti-science movement is an existential threat to us.

Pandemics create eugenics because people either have to deal with their own mortality and accept they aren’t in control of their lives as much as they thought, or they can double down and blame those who got sick and died for being weak and that’s why they died. If others are weak for dying to the virus, then they are strong and thus immune and superior. You understand where this is going, right? This creates the breeding grounds for eugenics-based fascist ideology. People are getting sick, people don’t want to deal with their own mortality, so they look for an explanation. This is where the anti-science conspiracy theories come into play. I’ve had my own run-ins with conspiratorial thinking and I can understand how it happens. When a major traumatic event happens, it can be incredibly isolating, so you look for any community you can. It’s a massive relief just to know you have a connection to a larger community that also shares your plight, even if you can’t really interact with them. It’s why they take this stuff so personally, it’s not just an ideological attack, it’s an attack not just on them, but the entire worldview they’ve constructed to not have to confront their own mortality.

This especially isn’t surprising in light of the Republican party’s overall anti-science stances in regards to vaccinations, climate change, and trans rights. This isn’t new, this is just the natural endpoint of their ideology. COVID-19 was just gasoline on the campfire that was MAGA. They explicitly listed antipsychotics as a medication class they thought was causing problems and I’ve been on one since Jan 2024 cause COVID had fried my brain the previous August. This is why I don’t pay attention to the news much anymore and have largely gotten off Substack. I already know I’m screwed, I don’t need to know every detail. I’m also trans, biracial, disabled, chronically ill, and a political dissident. If it’s important, I’ll hear about it from my friends. This is about where my comments end. I’m just north of 1k words and I’m happy with how much I wrote. It’s fitting that an article that started off as an extended tangent wouldn’t hit my usual word count.