modernheretic

I recently appeared on the New York Mandate Podcast, and I am honored that I got to share my experience of the New York lockdowns and mandates with the world. I talked to Aimee at length, and I am adding some further reflections on our conversation here. I encourage everyone to listen to our conversation and to follow the important work that Aimee is doing in documenting the fallout from unprecedented government actions that the rest of the news media continue to ignore.

On the Culture of Testing

The culture of testing in New York City was quite excessive to the point of being fetishistic. People were constantly testing just because. I had friends with no symptoms who were electing to get tested nearly every day, a practice they continued even after getting vaccinated. Negative test results were treated by some as a badge of virtuosity, proof of how fastidiously they masked and socially distanced themselves. If they were sick and already recuperating at home with a mild illness, they would test even though there would be no change in their recovery or outcome if they received a positive result. If they came into contact with someone who came into contact with someone who came into contact with someone who tested positive, they would get tested regardless of whether any of the people in the chain were actually sick. Thus, covid testing became totally divorced from the idea of illness and became merely a moral litmus test, a way to demonstrate your obeisance to the cult.

I could see that the technology of testing was controlling us instead of us controlling the technology. The concept of illness was defined solely in terms of the technology; whether you were actually sick no longer mattered. All that mattered was what the test results said, despite the fact that they might bear no relation to whether one was experiencing symptoms indicative of illness and transmissibility. The culture of testing was a means of continuing to fuel hysteria. Fear of death and severe illness was replaced by concerns about the meaningless statistic of covid cases rising. As long as we continued to test indiscriminately, the government could continue to claim an emergency regardless of whether the positive cases were associated with illness at all.

As I relayed on the podcast, I got tested for covid one time in response to my employer making it a condition of my return to work after being sick (and I did not mention that I believe my illness was the result of a breakthrough infection since everyone I was interacting with at that time had been vaccinated). It was only after I tested that I learned that employers are not permitted to require a negative covid test to return to work because a person can continue to test positive for months after infection. Despite this fact being acknowledged by the government and medical experts (it is hard for me to even write that phrase now without air quotes), I was pressured by people in my life to continue testing to prove I was not contagious. I was in a losing position where the burden was on me to prove the impossible to allay their irrational fears.

That is another reason I was opposed to the vax-or-test mandate. I could see that it could create a situation in which healthy people would be placed in impossible positions in which they are fully recovered from illness but testing positive for an illness they no longer have (or perhaps did not have) with no way to remove the presumption of illness. Thus, the continual testing would serve to stigmatize healthy, non-contagious people as dangerous. It was already uncomfortable enough being the rare unvaccinated person in the workplace; we did not need to give coworkers further ammunition to discriminate against us by giving them false positives to use against us. I could also see that having only unvaccinated workers test, despite the fact that vaccinated people could still transmit the illness, would skew the statistics the government was collecting to make is look like unvaccinated individuals posed a greater risk, which could then be used to further persecute us.

On Fear and Social Isolation

In hindsight, some of the pessimism I felt under vaccine mandates might seem extreme, and I wish I could better express how I came to feel that way. Words feel inadequate to convey what a nightmare New York City was during this period. For years, I was surrounded by people who were terrified of human contact. It was demoralizing to be continually treated with revulsion, to see people pull away from you because they are scared that human contact is lethal and to see your friends making diligent effort to stay exactly six feet away from you at every second of your interactions. How can you possibly build closeness with people who are determined to maintain physical separation from you and who treat you as though you are dangerous? For me, it became easier and more comfortable to just be alone.

The atmosphere of the city was generally fearful, stressful, and depressing. The digital kiosks on every corner admonishing people to stay isolated, mask up, and get vaccinated; the non-stop commercials on television of New York City’s health commissioners reminding you that living and socializing are dangerous; the hotline provided so residents could snitch on their neighbors for noncompliance; the practice of having to provide your contact information to restaurants when indoor dining finally reopened so that the government could potentially track you down and force you to quarantine; the fear that a neighbor or coworker would see you unmasked and report you; the signs posted on every storefront advising you of the state-imposed mask and vaccine mandates; the daily 7 p.m. ritual of people hollering and banging pans, ostensibly to honor nurses but which seemed like an outlet for pent-up frustration akin to Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate; the aggression from people charged with enforcing the mandates; the worry that, as the only unvaccinated person in the workplace, you could become the focal point for all your coworkers’ fears and neuroses around covid, that every illness thereon will be attributed to your presence in the office; the ubiquitous mobile testing centers on street corners; and the random members of the public who saw themselves as vigilante enforcers who felt it was their duty to police the people around them—all of this contributed to a gloomy, dystopian atmosphere. There was no escape from the weighty presence of government in your daily life and no relief from the constant reminders that you were a reviled person in society’s eyes.

And I was remiss in not mentioning on the podcast that during the mandates New York State government was also floating the idea of creating detention centers for persons deemed dangerous. Given how loosely they were defining danger and how accepting the populace had been of all the draconian measures up to that point, fear that unvaccinated people might in the future be rounded up and sent to these detention centers did not seem terribly far-fetched.

As the lone dissenter in my social network, I created a lot of cognitive dissonance for people in my life. I wanted to believe that such cognitive dissonance would lead to a change in mindset, but that was not the case. My friends—what few I remained in contact with—reacted by rationalizing that I might somehow be different from all the other supposedly stupid and selfish unvaccinated people out there, that I was possibly a limited exception to an otherwise noble rule. My family responded by trying to pressure me into compliance. When I refused to submit, they would lecture me about how I needed to respect their choices, as though it were their choices under attack rather than my own. It was surreal. Here is an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote shortly after the mandates were announced:

I am increasingly feeling a schism between myself and what I’ve come to think of as my Old Normal family and friends. Dealing with them is so painful and alienating that I am not optimistic about these relationships lasting. They are being brainwashed and radicalized to hate dissidents like myself, but even if they weren’t—or perhaps because of it—they are constantly trying to police me into conformity. It is unbearable. Sometimes it is direct, such as when E—– refused to accept my answer about not wanting to get vaccinated and pressured me despite my clear no. Sometimes it is angry and hostile, as previously documented with my dad. Sometimes it is subtle, such as my dad making an extended speech about being proud that my cousin got vaccinated with pointed reminders about my being the only one in the family who isn’t, or when D—– and S—each separately suggested that my resistance is unreasonable. Sometimes it is manipulative such as when B—–, knowing my opposition to masks, gifted me a mask and pressured me to wear it, or when T—– pulled out a bag of masks and told me to pick one after I already told her that I did not want to wear one.

These people absolutely cannot tolerate non-conformity and are continually pushing to get me to bend to their conformity. I even strenuously try to steer the conversation to other topics, but they make it a point to drag it out and confront you so they can let you know that your position is wrong. I’ve gotten it so much this past year and a half that I am fed up. They don’t realize how much they are pushing me away.

Society has been divided and they are trying to keep me on their side, not realizing that I want no part of the world they’re creating. And maybe having me in their life is hard because it forces them to try (though not very hard) to reconcile their love for me with the loathing of the villain I am supposed to be due to my non-compliance. I expect one day the loathing will win, and I would not be surprised if they reported me to the authorities as a suspicious or radicalized person. This is where we’re at.

Luckily, we did not get to the point of my family reporting me to the government, but it illustrates how alienated I felt and why I was emotionally ready to leave my entire social world behind in favor of what might be a more reclusive existence. If felt like the only way I might be able to live freely and authentically was to get away from all the people who were constantly pressuring me to compromise my values and beliefs in service of their own.