The World Will Not Stop For You

No matter how much it should.

They’re lettin’ it rip, baby

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In November of 2023 I participated in what was called Block Cop City, a mass action meant to shut down construction of “Cop City” in Atlanta. Immediately after that action, I began writing its postmortem, because I was there, and because most of what I saw that had been written about it was idealized junk. I interviewed certain organizer leaders, Atlanta locals, and rank-and-file activists to get their thoughts on how the action went and how future actions could be organized better. It’s a story I think is very important because it says a lot about the current state of the left’s direct action circles (surprise, they’re dysfunctional!). Block Cop City, in many ways, was an abortion. A shit show. I should get around to publishing that story one of these days. But, you know, writing is hard sometimes. But there’s one scene from that action that is pertinent to what I want to say today.

There we were, about 300 radicals (and surely some undercover cops), arrayed in a circle in a big room still too small for all of us, trying to figure out what the hell we were gonna do to Stop Cop City. Some people were wearing masks, most were not. I was sitting towards the center of the circle, serving as a representative “spoke” for my small affinity group of three people for the spokes-council (anarchist, direct action lingo). The day of the big action was just two days away, and it was still incredibly nebulous. One would think this would be the time for figuring out logistical questions as a group, being on the same page about meeting spots and certain contingency plans. But, unfortunately, in a most demoralizing way, several people took up valuable speaking time to try to shame anyone in the room who wasn’t wearing a mask. Some people sheepishly whipped out a mask and put it on. Others decried that the action wasn’t intersectional enough, that it didn’t take care of the most vulnerable in the community, and so on. Then later on, after the action kinda-sorta happened (we got tear gassed at least), the online recriminations began, of course. Some people were saying that the Block Cop City organizers were ableist fascist eugenicists because they didn’t require masks at the events. Others responded by saying this kind of overheated rhetoric disrupted the ability of the group to effectively organize, and thus was doing the police’s work for them.

Totally rational.

One attendee at a planning meeting wrote afterwards that “roughly 30 minutes of the allotted time were taken up by someone who had no intention of attending the action and actively encouraged others not to attend. In a confusing and cliché-filled rant reminiscent of a counter-insurgency handbook script, they suggested that Muscogee people [original tribe of the land] did not support the initiate. They simultaneously accused the group of not being militant enough and of not being careful enough. Another Muscogee person briefly combated them, vocally supporting forest defenders’ bravery and courage.” Ultimately, the action didn’t stop cop city, surprise.

Over a year since that failed action, and going on five years since the outbreak of the pandemic, there is a kind of schizoid nature in the society regarding covid-19. Take this recent masked Kimya Dawson concert in Seattle, where an organizer with the group Mask Bloc tells the audience:

Resistance will not come from eugenicist policies like let-it-rip or “only the vulnerable are affected.” What they don’t say is that we are all vulnerable. Everyone here is vulnerable. … The truth is, anything worth doing in community can be done in a mask. Masking might not be that sexy, it might not cause healthcare CEOs to drop dead in the street, but it will keep us from dropping dead in the street. CEOs and our fascist, imperialist government want us sick. They want us infected. They want us disabled and demoralized, but fuck that. When we protect ourselves we protect each other, and we create the world we want to see — not our representatives, not our presidents, not the CDC, not our local governments, not incentivized doctors or for-profit corrupt healthcare systems. … Masking is punk as fuck.

Woot-woot.

I have some questions though. Do you expect humanity to wear masks in public all the time? Not should they, but will they? And is there ever going to be an end to that expectation, or is it a desired forever normal? Do you think that the very human tendency to return to a mean level of social behavior will ever fundamentally change? Do you think that shaming is a helpful tactic within organizing spaces — spaces ostensibly meant to materially change things for the better, or is it really just the same age-old ostracizing that is endemic to leftwing organizing?

Dawson wrote in a note on the above video: “I know there are certain disabilities/conditions that might prevent a person from masking. I understand. The rest of us will mask to protect you.”

In a zine produced by Rimona Eskayo called Mask Up, We Need You: Palestinian Solidarity, Covid-19, and the Struggle for Liberation (available at your local radical coffeeshop), the author sketches out some reasons why you should be wearing a mask in public:

Wear a mask because you hate surveillance! Wear a mask to fight individualism! Wear a mask because your boss sucks! Wear a mask to say “fuck you” to Genocide Joe! Wear a mask because we’re fighting for Land Back. And reparations. And the fall of the amerikkkan-israeli empire. Wear a mask because you want trans kids to become trans elders. Wear a mask because disabled people deserve to live full lives! Wear a mask because no one should have to risk their life just to go to work, school, the grocery store, the post office, or the doctors office. Wear a mask because we need you in our future.

This sounds great. But when does the mask-wearing stop?

The world we’re building won’t look like 2019. Our collective liberation requires us to acknowledge the ongoing airborne pandemic, put a mask back on, and choose collective safety over mass death and disablement in the name of “normalcy.” Being adaptive means no more eating in restaurants, no more unmasked raves, concerts, and parties. Letting go of how-it’s-always-been-done and adapting to our current realities is the only way we create our liberated future.

No more restaurants — ever, apparently.

“When the US government declared the covid-19 pandemic over, they lied. And by force or by collusion, the rest of the world followed suit,” the zine says. I’m gonna venture to say that that is attributing some pretty sinister motivations to the simple fact that people are just dumb lazy animals with no sense of history who just want to live their lives with minimal inconvenience! Of course capitalism is indifferent to the deaths and diseases it causes. No argument there. But human nature is pre-political, pre-economy, pre-everything. A central problem with the zine is that it gives no voice to the idea, even to refute it, that always wearing a mask in social settings is considered by most people, I think rightfully, to be a bad thing — perhaps necessary sometimes, but something which should be mitigated as soon as possible through other public health means. And again, even if you don’t think that’s true, even if you believe that the days of “eating in restaurants” and “unmasked parties” should be over forever in your liberated future, you are simply engaging in a fight that will not be won. I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeonly realist here. I have great affinity for those who have the ability to imagine a better, possible world, free from the constraints of our current frameworks. But, I mean, look around you. Are you really serious about this? Is this the fight? Humanity has gone on without you.

I say this, not as a value judgement, good or bad, but merely as a statement of fact: the world will not stop for you. Humanity will not maintain constant outrage or vigilance. Any and all safety protocols will fall by the wayside. You can lock yourself in your house, scream that the parties and the fun need to stop, reject the social scene. But your friends will move on. Your family will move on. The people in your life who should be there for you through everything will tell you, at some point, I’m sorry, I care about you, I wish you the best, but I need to get on with my life.

Time only goes in a straight line, for good and for ill. We had the Holocaust, said never again, and now we have Holocaust 2.0! The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed between 50-100 million people worldwide. That is orders of magnitude greater than the deaths from Covid-19. But nobody today talks about the Spanish Flu or organizes their life around it or tries to get other people to organize their lives around it too. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a robust, public healthcare system that is prepared for the worst pandemics. Of course we should! We should also have a better regulated and more sustainable ag industry to prevent the spread of viruses and antibiotic-resistant illnesses. The pharmaceutical industry should be nationalized. We should have a society that treats health and wellbeing as a human right, not a commodity. I take this as given. I am afraid to tell you, however, that people will not wear masks and take Covid tests for the rest of their lives. They simply will not. “Ought” is not the same thing as “is”. Who can possibly look around at the world today in 2025 and honestly say that humanity — not should — but could go back to April of 2020?

And you may say to all of this, well, you’re just a eugenicist. Obviously you don’t care about immunocompromised people. You don’t care that multiple covid exposures is potentially debilitating. You don’t care about people suffering from long Covid. You don’t care about the vulnerable. Alright, well, you may not believe me, but all I can tell you is that I do care about such people. Which is why I am being serious with them. I am telling you that the world will not stop. Time goes on and there are no refunds. Again, I’m not saying this is good or bad, fair or unfair, it simply is. The things that contribute most to someone’s well-being, including the most vulnerable amongst us, are a strong sense of community, mutuality, and shared purpose. I have seen multiple people destroy the most important relationships in their community because of the way they go about demonstrating their outrage. I have seen attempts at organizing permanently waylaid by shame tactics. The overly didactic, intransigent, and uncompromising are the ones who ultimately destroy, not the people who they love, but the ability of the people they love to love them back. Do you understand?

I am haunted by the story of Michael Foster, a husband and father of two young children who, through his fervent environmentalist activism, alienated the most important people in his life when he needed them the most. “I think he believes he is doing what’s right, and he would be the first to say he’s doing this to protect his kids,” his ex-wife Malinda said. “What’s tragic is that he’s traumatizing his kids’ present, and what good is the kids’ future without their present?” When he talks about the effects his fervency had on his children, Foster says, “I am so sorry that I was not able to listen, or sit still enough, or be present with them enough so that they could share whatever they were feeling. I failed to stay close and safe, and be somebody they could count on, and that will always be my single greatest shame.”

Foster’s marriage fell apart. For turning off valves on an oil pipeline, he was sentenced to one year in prison and two years probation. His intractability, however righteous given the exigencies of the climate catastrophe, cost him the life he had built and caused irreparable harm. It is one of the most terrible, cruel ironies of our situation that the oppressions we are subjected to every single day from up on high degrade our communities and our most cherished relationships. Even when we think we are doing good, we destroy each other, not those who deserve to be destroyed.

I know, truly, what it feels like to think, to want, to know, to shout, that the world should stop for you, just for a moment, to wait, so you can see it come undone, so you can get some kind of acknowledgement from the world that the end of all good things has come, some time to remember, some time to stay useless, some time to plant a marker and say, look, please, this was important, wasn’t it? Tell me it was important for you too. Tell me it meant something. Tell me it was hard to let go. Otherwise, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I get it. But time is not given and time is not taken. When you come back to the unstoppable world, if you ever do, you will find that the relationships that meant the most to you seem never have to existed, and what waits for you now can only ever be a cheap imitation of what was, of what you really wanted.

I am telling you, there has to be a way to keep moving in the world that doesn’t relinquish what you value most, that affirms the human and the sacred, that rages against a “progress” built on exploitation, but which nevertheless submits itself to the uncaring eyes of the world, to the rolling river of time. I am truly sorry to say, there is no other way to go through life than this. The alternative, I know, is desolation. I am sorry.

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