traveling

[dragonlady7]

is it a mega-spreader event at this point?, probably, fuck i don't want this disease, but i have to live my life, i have to help my family, it cannot be up to me, do // not // reblog

via https://ift.tt/38TKKjr

(don’t reblog, I am not prepared for this to go way out of context on other people’s dashboards)

I know, I know, but I’m traveling for Thanksgiving.

I’m going to the farm where my isolation pod is, where I’ve been working all summer on the line at my sister’s poultry slaughterhouse. We’ve got one last big job– everyone’s turkeys. Two processing dates for two batches– we’re processing for another producer, as is traditional, and if he’s got 40-pounders like last year we’re gonna beat him up.

Yeah, I don’t live locally, yeah I’ve been working at my actual-income job for the last three weeks since we processed the final batch of chickens for the year, because yeah, I need actual money to survive. Yeah, that means I’m traveling from a hotspot (7% testing positive in Erie Co. as of yesterday) to… well, another hotspot, Rensselaer Co is up over 3% as of yesterday as well. (I got the NY Covid app on my phone and monitor it obsessively.)

(I’ve been strictly quarantining for weeks for this, only going, well, to work, in a retail store*, because I have to, because the unemployment ran out, because there’s still work that’s gotta be done, because my employer’s not getting rent relief or any kind of stimulus check, because there’s no money unless you’re already rich. I haven’t been into a restaurant since March. I haven’t been outside my house without a mask on in a couple of weeks now. So, how good a “quarantine” is that? You fucking tell me.)

(*I work in the office in the back. Yeah, I don’t talk to customers. Does that make me at lower risk? It’s all the same building, it’s all the same ventilation system, it’s mostly the same room. IDK; I leave my mask on. Does it help? I don’t actually know.)

I’m on an Amtrak train because I’m tired, because my car is not in great shape at the moment, because I’m going to get a ride back with someone afterward. (Yeah! More traveling. We’re reprehensible.) And this car is crammed (to strict guidelines, a maximum density– they mark the trains sold out at 50% capacity) with college kids who are going home, because it’s terrifying out in the world and they want to see their mothers. And maybe that’s going to kill some of their mothers. And maybe some of their mothers are going to kill them.

The thing about all of this, as I look around at all the people traveling for Thanksgiving, and read all the Spicy Hot Takes on the Internet about how people traveling for Thanksgiving are the downfall of society, is that neither of those two parties are wrong. I am both of those. I think traveling is a terrible idea. And here I am, on a fucking train, watching the sun rise over corn stubble somewhere just outside of Batavia.

Because the thing is, this kind of shit is why humans organize themselves into governments. This is what a government is supposed to be for. A government is supposed to manage a fucking health crisis epidemic. It cannot come down to a college kid standing up to their family and opting to spend Thanksgiving alone (and possibly dying alone in their dorm room because their suitemates didn’t dare defy their parents and went home and brought the virus back). It cannot come down to a frightened parent telling their child to stay away. Humans are humans and we need human things, including and especially other humans. It’s got to be someone’s job to look at the big picture and allocate resources and implement policies to do what is necessary. And not half-assed impossible-to-enforce policies like “don’t have more than ten people in your house, privately”, which, if you’ve ever had an overbearing mother-in-law, you try telling her you’re not coming over and see what happens when she won’t buy Christmas presents for your kids in retaliation, you try dealing with your husband’s feelings about it, you try standing all alone against that like, fucking, Cuchulainn but with a frying pan and crying kids, like, fuck.

No– policies like “we’re paying every restaurant’s employees to stay home and we’re giving paid sick leave to every wage earner whose job has been deemed essential”, kind of shit. Rent relief. Promises of re-hiring bonuses. Shit like that. None of this verbal-shaming-only bullshit that only makes people mad and doesn’t actually fucking stop any of the problem behavior.

I promise you, if there was money in it, the anti-mask rabble rousers would have a whole lot less traction.

It cannot be my individual effort. It can’t.

(I’m wearing an N95 I found in my basement with a three-layer fabric mask over the top and I’m fucking miserable and my face hurts and I have four and a half more hours of this to go. Oh my god does my face hurt. Shit these things suck.)

But I have to do this; it’s essential agricultural work. People have to fucking eat.

(Yeah, I’m going to wind up violating the law by eating Thanksgiving dinner with more than ten people, because that’s how big the farm isolation pod is; my immediate family was six, and now there are husbands and kids, and if we’re all here to process turkeys we’re going to fucking eat dinner together afterward, we’ve all been quarantining for it. Are we supposed to spend the day working together, eat lunch in shifts, and then eat dinner in shifts???)

Worst of all, the half-assed finger-wagging broke-ass attempts at stopping this are mostly being made by Democrats. Thousands of small business owners being ruined by this are going to blame Andy Cuomo (who is indisputably a piece of shit anyway so they’re not wrong in spirit, even if they are in specifics), and are going to vote straight-ticket Republican the rest of their lives over this. Across the country, lame-duck Republicans are going to trash the place on their way out, and the Democrats who come into office and try to fix it but don’t have any money to spend are going to be blamed for it, and in years to come, everyone will blame the Democrats for this. Just watch! Fuck your facts, fuck your feelings. Shrug. (I mean, to be fair, the Ds probably could get money, but they also only believe in giving money to rich people, which seems to be why our government thinks it exists. So they’re gonna bail out fucking Amazon or something and people will starve and they’ll wag their fingers at the progressives who voted for them to stop the bleeding and say we’re asking for too much. They very much will deserve it, in the end, and then Rs who never gave a shit in the first place will sweep gleefully back into power and strip the carcasses for scrap metal and sell it. I mean, I’ve seen this before, I’m old now.)

I’m tired. Please don’t reblog this, I’m not ready for people to read the first sentence and flame me over it for months. (Nobody ever reads the whole thing before they send anon hate.)

Comments

[minoanmiss]

You're right and I'm sorry you have to say it.
I send you oxygen.

[harpers_child]

Can I offer you a virtual hug in these trying times?

[redstapler]

Like I know there's the whole "but it's okay when I do it" shit, but here's the thing:

The way you're doing it? If you're gonna, the way you're doing it is the correct way.

You're going out of necessity, you're staying within the pod. If literally everybody did it this way, we'd have a lot fewer cases to worry about.

I hope you and yours have as good a holiday as you can. <3

[j00j]

This.