When You Called It Genocide

Audio version below

Pretend you're like me for a second.

Don't worry - I know you're not. I know that you're a normal person who does normal-people things. You go to restaurants, you smile at strangers. Your parents are currently proud.

We're just pretending for a little change-of-scene. You're like me, and this morning you started a yawn. Started, I said, because it didn't finish. You sit there gape-mouthed, ears roaring, neck and torso taut until your muscles jump. You keep trying, each try smaller than the last. The yawn shrinks but stays, a worn-out texture at the bottom of your chest. You ponder what to do about your tiredness. There's a bed and a fridge and a water glass in other rooms. But Twitter is right here in your hands.

It's nice that now there's an app that wires you like coffee was supposed to. Maybe it doesn't work for people whose feeds are full of cats and concerts. But since you're like me, you're looking at things hidden in the nooks and crannies of a normal, click-written algorithm.

Tinu is dead.

You saw this coming, but only in a sneaky, thieving, mathematical way. You were angry at the part of your brain that added up times she said insurance wouldn't pay for cancer treatment, and treatment was a longshot anyway.

You tried to listen with just the lobes that make the pretty pictures. Watching her crowdfund swell again and again from the weight of how many loved her got you used to seeing miracles. Other peoples' crowdfunds filled because of her. There were stories written in steel about who lives and dies, endings she melted into molten trails that could lead anywhere. You know love isn't a miracle, but sometimes, maybe it is. Because today her voice keeps echoing down your timeline under retweets like goodbyes.

"When I die," she said last month, "People will say I didn’t advocate long enough. I might become a hashtag for a few days and people will move on. My friends will keep dying unnecessary deaths."

The cancer didn't kill her. She wanted us to know, the cancer didn't kill her. The tributes in your digital tread have that brawling tone belonging to people deserted. They share the knowing that a whole community has died, will die, is dying in the person left behind.

You pause scrolling over a mutual's face, wondering if they changed their picture or you just never looked at it closely. Little bones are poking through their skin. It reminds you of the way your father's face changed when he got sick.

Faces in your feed keep shrinking. Sometimes they come with stories.

"Please, Dad, I'm only 95 pounds," says a text shared by a bed-bound person whose parents - now caretakers - are refusing to cook them a meal. Someone told them their child's condition is modern-day hysteria and exercise is the cure. They figure if they stop cooking, hunger will produce a person capable of getting out of bed.

If you were their neighbor, touching grass outside, you wouldn't have heard about the sick person starving on the other side of lacquered walls. You have to be floating disembodied in a world of text to know many people that sick. You learn about abusers who used to be family, serving bloody meat for dinner and throwing medicine away. You learn that funding set aside for a cure has been spent testing exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy. Those parents convinced that sickness is a figment didn't pull their ideas from thin air.

Shrinking people living shrinking lives come into your orbit because 280 characters is the smallest amount of energy it costs to be heard, and scrolling is the smallest amount of energy it costs to feel awake.

Maybe the energy is just called 'anger' - but it's not the stereotype of that emotion. It's not the giddy, reckless excuse for cruelty that catches and spreads through crowds like fire. It's a steadying beam, the gall that keeps part of you moving when yawns are too weak to push sails.

"If I do die, this is what killed me," Tinu said. "People not masking," or believing that covid causes harm. For Tinu, covid became long covid and triggered a cancer relapse. Every time she went for treatment, she became sicker with infections spread by staff who no longer mask.

There is more illness than there used to be; spaces once safe are too dangerous now for some to go, while the tools that sick people use are becoming politically toxic.

Days after Tinu's passing, the mayor of Kentucky's capital announced a total mask ban. Tinu wrote in August about the lack of masks killing her, while the planners of the Democratic National Convention were busy working up security protocols allowing attendees to wear masks "if necessary due to disability." This, too, was a mask ban, mirroring laws popping up in Republican strongholds. The exceptions most of them include for health and disability make police and security the arbiters of public health. You wonder why normal people are ok with this, until your mathy brain flap starts to complain that they're trying not to think about what people like Tinu need to stay alive.

It wasn't long ago that an MSNBC analyst complained on twitter about Kamala Harris's first campaign ad. There was one scene where one sick person in the background of a hospital was wearing a surgical mask. Bad optics, this guy said. Masked faces salt election vibes. "Remember," he argued, "We're not going back."

Before he knew what happened, #SaltingTheVibes was trending, and there were pictures of mask-wearing faces hijacking digital space.

There was anger in this, but anger screaming a language of joy. Here I am, with my blue hair and green pants, sitting over aster. Here are my dark eyes and fat arms, knitting purple yarn. Admire the magnetic spikes on my mask as here I am shopping, here I am working, here we are together, holding hands, and all our skin is sprinkled with the salty taste of pride.

"I didn't realize N95's had their own swifties," he grumbled, as our pictures marched in brazen parade through a global village square.

That was a moment for answering unspoken accusations. Those that gleam in the stares of friends and strangers who, when they see you in your respirator, bunch their shoulders up like panicked cats.

We could tell this as a story all about pandemic trauma, with dying as the fear behind their eyes. But abled people never need an excuse to gawk at medical devices. Trauma didn't write the Ugly Laws. Abled people have always wanted disabled bodies hidden, always detested those who make invisible differences seen.

So your anger has joy and your joy has anger when your friends invent a protest out of other people staring.

When you look long enough, a gawk becomes a gaze, becomes consideration. Horror-movie monsters come from glimpses unlit, bodies never seen before nor left in view too long. Do normal people know the feeling of being kept half-seen? Have they ever, when afraid, tried to look a little longer?

Last month on twitter you read, "when this catastrophizing mob is able to frighten the foremost HIV org into apologetic theatrics it feels serious," and it was about you.

Not you-you - not the you you know, and not the pretend-you I'm talking to, either. This was a you formed in negative space, a monster connected by the dots of fleeting peeks. Between those dots you could mutate into any shape they wanted to see; no one would ask them to explain the logic of your form. Monsters are just bodies that endlessly accommodate.

The person who made you a mob is an author with tens of thousands of followers. They were talking about the New York branch of ACT UP. The story starts in different places depending on who you are, but for us, it starts with a monster.

A mutual tweets that covid is the reason so many in their 30s are coming down with cancer. A feminist writer whose husband died under oncologists' care challenges the claim, and your friend tweets that she was only taking issue due to guilt over infecting a loved one fighting for his life. He continues in another thread, "I don't care if you're a widow. ...Being a widow doesn't give you a pass to participate in... genocide."

You wince, but not at that word. Your mutual is white and the woman they describe is Black, and you remember that racism finds ways to deny Black women kindness, even in the middle of grief.

There's a banner reading Silence = Death above your mutual's profile - the slogan of ACT UP. And when this feud goes viral, ACT UP responds indirectly, with a thread ending all in caps, "SOLIDARITY WITH ALL PEOPLE WHO ARE SICK! Solidarity with all who are caring for, loving and mourning sick people."

That wasn't the entire thread. There were lines about how people can't help getting covid, how accusing folks of murder for spreading illness is how those with HIV end up in jail, and how fighting systems is good but fighting individuals is bad.

These are the lines that draw the mob, according to those who see monsters. From your perspective it's the lines that plunge into a throng already embattled. Angry quote tweets come from people fighting hard to avoid getting covid, people fighting hard against the criminalization of masking, people fighting systems made of people whose methods of abuse are personal.

Normal people saw the pain of someone in grief and decided only sadism can animate they who ignore it. But you saw a disabled person identify with the someone who died rather than the one who lived to grieve.

A Black woman in mourning should never have been the face of this criticism, and it wasn't love behind that choice. It's not accidental but systemic that Black women become the face of everyone else's trauma. But it wasn't anti-racism that made a catastrophizing mob out of a disability justice organization at war with itself - for many of the angry people were also in ACT UP. That was the reason for the slogan in the banner.

Black disabled people pushed back the strongest against attempts to brand the whole episode as hysteria, posting receipts and pointing out racial disparities in covid deaths.

When the conflict escapes disabled twitter and cycles through the broader leftist ecosystem, an anti-ICE activist compares face masks to Klan hoods. Tinu, as angry as you've ever seen her, tweets a list in all-caps of those she's lost and almost lost to covid: her nephew, her sister-in-law, her cousin, herself. Friend after friend after friend. It was Black people they were calling Klansmen.

A day before this, a white woman filmmaker from Brooklyn, commenting on the same controversy, tweeted, "I just never see the horrors that the covid cautious crowd keeps telling me about reflected in my life. I have a few friends with long covid and it seems to suck, but some have recovered. Mass disabling and mass death just don't seem to exist."

The difference between those two points of view is the reason you didn't wince at the word, "genocide."

Violence often is a quiet thing, a friendly-voiced indifference. In March you read an article in NPR about a wife's reactions to her immunocompromised husband's covid precautions.

Since his doctor warned that infection for him could be very dangerous, and since he'd almost died of covid once, he'd been wearing masks and gargling CPC. This his wife called his "trauma" and "anxiety" as she described the stress his precautions were causing her family. For expert advice, she turned to a psychiatrist. With the help of this framing, she was able to convince her husband to compromise by eating at outdoor restaurants instead of getting takeout, and to recognize in his nonstop masking on an airplane to visit her family the effort he was making to meet her halfway, by flying around the world.

The first time you saw the piece you felt a tidal surge of despair and floundered, feeling with your toes for the bottom. It was worse that this was NPR, and the lifestyle section, and that the tone was light and sweet. Something should be breaking, when a person says that restaurants rank near the same as their partner's life. It should crackle up your scalp and live in your neck hairs. But you could see the imprint of a thousand fingers scrolling past, thumbs tapping red into the heart.

They were going to let it go. Only this time, this one time, you and me together decided not to let them. He was there on twitter, the husband, the subject, joking in a quote-tweet: "It's me. I'm the problem."

Our horror was met in a steady, swelling drumbeat. A backlash you never saw before boiled to the surface, pushed the story to the top of all your social media and kept it rising until it eclipsed everything else - the part where she said he could die, the part where she called a therapist, the part where he called himself the problem. Analysis of everything wrong and everything cruel in a piece sold as kindly reflection. Emails to the editor, reddit posts and twitter quotes by the thousand. The article was retracted, but the story kept telling: screenshots that cracked the gloss on gory thought and poured out chewy marrow.

"You thought he was alone this whole time," you said on your timeline, to no one in particular. If normal people listened close enough, you said, they would hear in that disabled rage the sound of a ferocious will to survive.

You were thinking of Fiqah.

Shafiqah Hudson was one of Old Twitter's foundational Black feminists. She died in February. She saw it coming.

Months earlier, she wrote, "I'm going to say, again, that when long COVID effects kill me - sooner than later - I need y'all to recognize and say LOUDLY what it was." She talked about her sickness and then said, "I'm not going to be alone. And this won't be considered a massive crime against humanity until we're all gone. Just tell them I fought and tried."

Her unmet crowdfund dangled below her bio when you landed on her page. You search the words "if I die," trying to remember what she said. On the way you scroll through laughs you shared on Jane Eyre and patriarchy. And you realize how many, many times she told the world that this would happen.

"If I die, sue everyone," she said more than once at a hospital where no one listened and her rationed slice of healthcare was smaller than it should have been.

Do normal people understand that the dead do not forgive? Or do they imagine that the dying all aspire to be put to quiet rest?

"If I die" begins the sentences of many on your timeline in the days after Fiqah's passing. She told the truth: she wasn't alone.

You go to your own page, wondering what folks would find who wanted to remember you. You search the words you already searched - "death," and "die" and "hospital" - and you remember the last time you went. It was weeks ago. Your chest hurt. They thought it might be stress.

You wouldn't have gone to the ER if you didn't have to wait six months for a primary care appointment, but waiting was normal now. An athlete died in a hospital's lobby and you went viral for saying the waiting was the story. The biggest hospital in your state had just declared emergency; there wasn't even space for patients in the hallway.

"Capacity crisis," they called it, and they weren't the only ones. Hospitals around the world, from Rome to Spain to Canada, left thousands to manage at home this winter. Only some of the articles said why: a deluge of respiratory infections. This mirrored the impact on schools, when illness levels too high for function forced closure for days at a time.

Are the horrors that the covid cautious crowd keeps talking about really not reflecting the lives of normal people? You start searching "ER" on the pages of mutuals. Everyone you follow seems to have a story that shows a healthcare system in slow collapse. Then you click a news trend and try it on a rando. My god, you think, when your search comes up empty. These people never see a hospital's insides.

So there's a difference between our lives and the lives of the people seeing monsters. The stories are there for anyone who cares to look, like skeleton smiles in the pictures of shrunken friends. Could it be this hate and these stories connect?

"You might literally just not be fit for human society," says someone who uses twitter to talk about football to a mutual of yours one day.

The tweet is in response to discourse over Doordash. Debates about delivery apps explode every few months these days. The week you read that comment the conflict had gotten so loud that Last Week Tonight covered the ethics of using them. This episode didn't mention nazis.

Your mutual writes a thread explaining the ways that even microwaving food can be less accessible than ordering it hot. Soon their quote-tweets are piled high with white supremacists professing that delivery apps let too many weaklings survive. These comments land next to the tweets of leftists who say similar while hedging their eugenics with disbelief. No one disabled enough to struggle with a microwave should be able to use a cell phone, or allowed to live outside an institution.

Sometimes disdain is framed as class-consciousness. A comedian with 52,000 followers argues that with Doordash "the business model does not function without massively underpaying workers." Using the app as a habit "is a moral sickness."

Whenever you see this argument you ask the righteous leftist if they eat in restaurants, knowing almost all of them do. They rarely answer, which frustrates you because you want them to understand how they came to be shoulder-to-shoulder with nazis. It starts with them knowing that the difference between the tipped labor system they patronize and the one that they vilify is that one feeds people who eugenicists think should die.

Where all this discourse started is where the leftists and nazis converge, with a twitter user followed by 11,000 quote-tweeting a disabled Black person. The disabled person complained of the physical trouble of getting food left in the street by a driver. The twitterer with a handle reading "PolishXcellence" and a profile picture of Ramzan Kadyrov responded that DoorDash isn't for disabled people. Exploited workers, this person said, don't have time to knock on doors.

Arguments spawned from the quote tweets of the quote tweets of disabled people protesting their right to services against leftists who said that class consciousness means no one has any such right.

You argued and argued and realized too late you'd been had when you saw the account that started the mess reply with a dirty pig's photo to a quote-tweet reading, "Placating subhumans is detrimental to progress. Who knew?"

PolishXcellence would delete the initial quote-tweet once it had gone viral, maximizing chaos as remembered first impressions replaced their trail of text. Soon after the discourse made its way to John Oliver's desk, this account would stop tweeting altogether.

You take a closer look at the old man arguing in your mentions that disabled people threaten workers' rights and clock the products of AI - the missing ear canals, the glasses melting into eye-bags, the background with its Escher-esque, twisting gazebo on a building made of fade-away brick.

There have been bots for ages, but nothing quite like this. Hundreds and thousands dropped like locusts this January, targeting every mention of covid. Mutuals' posts with twenty likes are stampeded - first by the bots and then by the trolls algorithmically dragged to their dogwhistles.

"Hey, pronoun-in-bio freaks, get another vax," they chime at the bottom of studies shared between friends. "You think if you vote for Biden we'll get another lockdown?"

People say twitter doesn't matter, but someone's paying for this discourse. Every story comes from somewhere. You've watched the arguments you had with twitter-rando transphobes slowly get picked up by right-wing politicians, and hashtags put the phrases "me too" and "Black lives matter" on everybody's lips. There might be a lag, but what starts online doesn't stay there. We've entered an age of live-streamed genocide.

Before the trolls hit, you were seeing the impact of your twittering showing up in pictures. College kids protesting Israel's bombs began wearing crowdfunded masks at the urging of disability justice advocates, and ever since then mask bans have aimed to kill dissent coded leftist by the respirator. Those who mask to protect their own lives are an exception, these bans argue.

There's a connection between not caring about explosions your phone can show you and believing it's absurd to expect abled people to protect disabled lives.

A month before protests began, the president's old chief medical advisor was asked to calm the public. Covid was hitting hospitals and colleges hard since fall semester started. Some were requiring masks again, and people seeing all these masks were asking if it meant lockdowns were coming back.

Anthony Fauci told the BBC that no, things were different in 2023 than in 2020 - there was enough immunity from vaccines and infections that there wouldn't be another hospital crisis.

"Even though you'll find the vulnerable will fall by the wayside," he calmly remarked, "—they'll get infected, they'll get hospitalized and some will die—it's not going to be the tsunami of cases that we've seen."

It was clear even then that he was wrong - the tsunami was already rising. This is why normal people were seeing masks return. But Fauci was the face of the president's response, and he answered a political question: no, the president wouldn't be doing anything to stop it.

If people were comforted by the suggestion of a threshold that wouldn't be breached, they should have been alarmed by winter when hospital ERs stuck a "closed" sign on the door. But who would ever read that sign except the kind of person who sees a hospital's insides?

We learned as kids that genocide is when everyone agrees it's fine for certain groups to die. But when we learned about it and they told us it was wrong they said we'd know by how it felt like being monsters. They never said it felt like being normal, and mostly everyone agreeing things were fine. They never said our only hope of not doing one is to listen to the folks who aren't ok.

"A third of those with my condition die within three months," you read on twitter when a mutual receives a new diagnosis.

This is a person who knows you by name, who you zoomed with a couple of times a week in the months before Fauci's statement. In a group for health equity you worked together, organizing protests and phone banking to try and get masks back in hospitals. Together, you keep watch against zoom-bombing nazis and misogynists inventing new forms of sexual harassment.

You follow in awe and some guilt the way your friend answers every call for assistance, working from their sick bed, even when it means they don't have the energy to eat later on. When they speak the bones show through their skin.

If you only knew them from a profile picture, you might have thought them shrunken, but they have you convinced that they're made of brass by the end of the first call. On the day when you agree to be the host on a zoom with lots of people, you stumble through it, betrayed by your earlier confidence. They stay after everyone else leaves, harnessing their precious energy to ask how you are feeling. "You did well," they say, "but I was watching your eyes move back and forth." In their company you could never feel half-seen. They clocked your panic and sat with you while your nerves reanimated.

Death is always a tsunami.

Once you might have thought that someone who counts graves by the million must think bigger than you. Then the president's doctor said there was no better tomorrow than dying just a little more than normal.

In this age of microscopes and robot dogs, only the dying strive to wring from the world a dollop of potable gold. You learn to shrink your thinking to the sticky width of microns, to follow dew-bloated virions on Brownian trails and zig-zagging collision courses with melt-blown threads. Mutuals share articles connecting old, ordinary sicknesses to the mysteries that shake up peoples' lives. Schizophrenia has ties to mono, asthma to the common cold. Cancer has so many routes through virus that you start to ask, how much of aging is infection from decades gone?

It was last century that the great flu started, and we tried to control it with clean hands and kerchiefs. It was droplets, they said, that spread sickness - spit in the streets and kissing booths. It was sneezes and coughs that landed on hands, hands that touched mouths and mouths that swallowed it. They built hospitals and schools around this story, put it on posters and taught it to us all our childhoods. The same tale for 100 years, and we never asked why flu should be a season.

Covid put a revolution in the air. Particle physicists sat down with virologists for the first time and discovered that we had been wrong. Not touching, but breathing is how we get sick. Not sneezing, but breathing is how it spreads. Covid, and flu and ordinary illnesses are airborne. We could cure the common cold, if we wanted.

Bureaucracy moves too slow for revolution. By the time an account of the discovery had been in circulation seven months, the Director of the UCL Genetics Institute wrote on twitter, "I believe it is time to give in soon."

He was talking about covid mitigations. This Professor, Francois Balloux, continued in a thread that, while an ideal world would not add a virus to the circulating brew, precautions were too "costly" to continue.

He didn't say which ones, or what the costs were. He proposed, as their alternative, ignoring covid. This would take everyone's help: trying not to get infected from here on out could only "prolong the pandemic" (by which he seemed to mean prolonging our awareness, for the opposite of "extracting ourselves" was "resuming a normal life.") Some might take longer than others to stop trying to get sick, he reasoned, but everyone should stop trying soon.

There was a backlash that included words like "eugenics" and "genocide," with many tweets being written by people who have never tweeted "covid" since. In this respect, Balloux's vision boasted clarity. Let them, he seemed to say, take their time getting back to normal. Let them talk, as they had all along, about protecting the weak. Some day soon the virus would come, and they'd feel in their bodies that they weren't the ones who'd die. Except, of course, for the ones who would die and stop tweeting.

Bookending Balloux's post, there were days between which the Delta CEO wrote the CDC, and the CDC published new guidelines that complied with Delta's request to cut the length of quarantine in half. Commercials congratulated the public already for going back to "normal," sharing travels and grins again. Four months after came the last step in a Great Unmasking, when the Supreme Court struck down Biden's travel precautions and airlines dropped masking as a rule.

Articles contextualize this choice with reference to assaults on flight attendants. It was violence in the air they saw, and shouting on the pavement; months before the airlines quit, truckers occupied Canada's capitol in defiance of pandemic precautions. A state of emergency was called.

You think it was then when people decided that science couldn't save us. Not from the people who stomp through sky and capitol, demanding we let each other die. Not from the people who slick the tables where policy is written, tugging us by pen strokes through shriveling horizons.

There were shouting crowds in front of schools. At one, three men with zip ties burst in to get the principal. It was the lingering precautions making people angry, we heard, but internet sleuths caught people showing up at every school. You think, this rage is being planted. Online were threats of civil war sprouting up in comment sections. In March of 2021, it came to light that Russia was the farmer.

St. Petersburg trolls churned out covid denial to turn the plague political, and political it had become. Texas lifted its mask mandate and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted about how wrong it was, how it endangered workers and those people dubbed "the vulnerable." Rightwingers were going viral for coughing on Uber drivers, and there was a sense going around the left that covid didn't start in a lab, but it had become a bioweapn.

By the time Joe won election, it was normal to call the pandemic genocide. Viral tweets said this was a thing that Trump had done, and it made sense to many normal folks whose stomachs dropped seeing nooses rise in the capitol.

By December 2020, vaccinations were beginning. In October the FBI arrested 13 guys who tried to kidnap Michigan's Governor and overthrow the state. Retaliation, they said, for making them wear masks. It was only since September that shut-downs and work-from-home had mostly gone away.

131,000 Americans dead was enough to call a genocide, a viral tweet said in July. In June somebody asked if 119,000 deaths was enough to use that word.

The first to say "genocide" and be believed was Jared Yates Sexton. In an article describing mitigation tools withheld from democratic states, he explained that Trump and Kushner crushed a contact-tracing plan because it was blue cities parking morgue trucks in the streets.

ACT UP New York said it first. In a post soon buried under backlash, the organization tweeted two images side by side. The first was a photo of the back of a protester's jacket, emblazoned with the words, "If I die of AIDS - forget burial - just drop my body on the steps of the FDA." The second was an illustration of a black facemask over a pink background, with words on the mask reading, "If I die of covid 19 - forget burial. Drop my body on the steps of Mar-a-Lago."

A thousand quote-tweets protested the comparison, citing criteria that wouldn't long make sense. AIDS was ignored, but covid wasn't. Marginalized groups were AIDS victims, but anyone could die of covid. AIDS patients were mocked while they died, but covid patients were treated with respect. Research was being funded to help them. These factors, people said, made AIDS a genocide, and covid something else.

These weren't the things that changed, of course, when Sexton declared a blue-state genocide. What changed was the voice declaring it.

Not everyone's allowed to say the dying is too much. Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd at the end of May. A victim like ten thousand others, and state was the crushing force. There had been protest before, of course, but never was there space for it as now. Never had so many restless eyes nowhere else to land as when the bars and markets shut their doors with empty offices. Streets came alive with the cry of genocide, filling up thoroughfares and spilling into waysides. Journalists lost eyes and old people died and massive corporations pledged to change. Band-aids over holes in sinking boats, you know. To themselves they promised something else - that normal would come back and never leave.

You mark a shift before and after protest in how people talk of the pandemic. In May people were linking white supremacists at anti-lockdown rallies to racial disparities in covid's killing, calling it genocide in many viral tweets. By April Esquire was calling out right-wing "'cull the herd' rhetoric." People were cracking that Trump was using "herd immunity" as a code for killing the weak.

In March, an article said Alabama’s disaster preparedness plan denied ventilators to people with traumatic brain injuries, and other disabilities. People call this plan eugenics. But in three months' time and on the other side of protest, a show called Sweet Tooth airs pandemic-themed episodes on Netflix. A man with concussive brain injuries volunteers to die in one of them.  "Let's face it," he says, explaining why it should be him who stays to fight the fascists so the rest of the group can escape. "My mind's never gonna be the same."

Racism and ableism and the present tense girded the word "genocide" until the world saw victims of it marching. Then the nation turned from angry dying eyes to comfort itself with fables of an acquiescent dead. Slipping, as it did, into narrative spun by Republicans.

It was a week after states began to shut down schools and restaurants that Texas' Lieutenant Governor said grandparents would risk death "in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves." He was talking about the restaurants.

There were grudges being born here, resentments ripe for kindling. Some of them would later flare up into insurrection. Born here, too, is a thing called trauma now by people once outraged at the thought of letting elders die. People who have, somewhere or other over the years, come to agree that others' deaths are not as scary as what it takes to stop them.

Nothing was as scary, in the end, as powerful men becoming the kind of people they said they never would be. Americans watched coups on the news. Americans watched Ebola and Zika and SARS rip through other continents. Never before had the grocery shelves emptied, the businesses closed, the airplanes sat on tarmac, telling us we couldn't go where we wanted.

But you did the math on global warming when your footsteps rebounded in a hollow grocery aisle. The normal they're in love with isn't real. No matter how many bodies we pile at the door, illusion's breach will come.

You remember what Katrina did to New Orleans, what Maria did to Puerto Rico. And you remember that the first time medical masks were banned happened in between these storms. BP spilled its oil and it wanted workers cleaning beaches without respirators whispering of toxic sands.

What has it become, the normal worth killing us for? With Appalachia underwater, orange poison rolling up a bright blue sky. Will normal people still not look their monsters in the face?

Nothing made AIDS a genocide so much as the thought that it was over. Atrocity is a hard sell of a word while it happens. The people who still talk about it, who touch it and tease out its normal implications, play with others' reality. They must be punished for contaminating collective memory, no matter if it never was over for those marginalized groups on whose behalf the memory was written.

Covid might really be over soon. Vaccines in final testing stages aim for an end to transmission. If it works then maybe they'll let themselves remember the times they called it genocide. People powerful enough to own the word will call it that again, and onto the mantel we'll go, you and me, like fossils or like trophies, with all our fuck-yous smothered under sacred chants of praise.

If they listen we will tell them normal is a lie built over other peoples' suffering. We will tell them it's a lie, drowning dreams of something better.