This was the first tweet I wrote regarding the protests following the murder of George Floyd. I wrote it on May 28, 2020.
I had been aware of and following the protests. And I'm pretty sure that I'd been retweeting a lot of stuff from others at this time. However, I hadn't felt a need to make a comment of my own.
I only felt a need to make this comment once I saw that nobody was really criticizing the protests in terms of how they could affect things like COVID transmission rates, or even cause mutations in COVID.
The people who were criticizing the protests were really only doing so because of the fact that Black people were protesting again. These were generally the same exact people who thought, and still think, COVID is a hoax. So they didn't really ever seem to factor COVID into their criticisms, except to show how the protesters not dropping dead in the streets after five seconds proved COVID was a hoax.
The people supporting the protesters generally pointed out, like I point out above, that the folks organizing the protests would most likely do their best to keep people safe by wearing masks, keeping socially distanced, keeping hydrated, and washing their hands. And, for the most part, they really did.
Another thing people supporting the protesters pointed out is that COVID can infect younger people, but its effects on younger people are way milder than its effects on older folks and people with underlying health issues. They also claimed that transmission rates shouldn't be an issue, as long as the crowds -- of hundreds of thousands of people sometimes -- kept socially distant and stayed masked.
I was aware of all these arguments as the protests developed and continued. And they made sense to me. However, I didn't completely agree with them. So as I wrote threads about COVID during the summer of 2020, I didn't really factor in these arguments. It might look stupid now. And it might look ignorant -- like, how could I not have been aware of these arguments? But I was aware.
The Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 really hit me in a bad emotional place. I think that's obvious from the threads I write. They made me reflect on the past few years I'd spend trying my best to do my part for equality and justice in America. By May of 2020, I'd felt my work had all been in vain. And by the time of the BLM protests, my frustration and sadness just became sheer despair.
As it should be clear from the threads I wrote between March and May of 2020, I was already extremely critical of a lot of the messaging about COVID we were all receiving in America. So it might have seemed more reasonable for me to have become even more critical of the standard COVID messaging as I watched the BLM protests develop.
However, my mental reaction was the complete opposite. I began to cling to the standard pre-protest COVID messaging fervently. This is evident in the threads I write about the protests in early June. Some of those threads are embarrassing, and even downright racist.
But I want to keep them cataloged in this blog, because they reflect who I really am. The BLM protests most likely caused me to have a mini nervous breakdown, which caused me to shift my mindset so that I afterwards clung to the standard pre-protest COVID messaging like it was my religion.
One effect of my clinging to the pre-protest COVID messaging was that I became even more reclusive than I'd been before.
I'm not sure whether I've previously mentioned this. But when I moved in April of 2020 (forced to move out of my place by my landlady's husband, who harassed and abused me in many different ways), I moved to a small mountain town about 100 miles outside of Denver.
My move had involved so much human interaction and non-mask wearing that I was really starting to question the standard COVID messaging and make plans for doing social things again -- especially politically. I'd contacted my county's Democratic Party and had even attended a couple Zoom meetings with them, making plans for outreach -- physical outreach -- to people, by the time the protests started up.
But, seeing the protests, I started into a huge decline of depression and reclusiveness. I scrapped the idea of participating in any physical outreach. And I even eventually stopped attending my county party's Zoom meetings. I just stopped wanting to have anything to do with outreach to people. I didn't want to reach out physically, by the phone, or over the internet. And I didn't even want to speak with my fellow party members.
I retreated completely into my shell. And I did so so much that I wouldn't even step outside my house, not even into my yard -- not even to pick up my newspaper! -- for seven or eight days at a time. I had been so traumatized, I'm sorry and not sorry to say, overlaying my own past few years with the past few days of the George Floyd protests, that my emotions just sank inward entirely, all gravitating inward on themselves.
However, if there were any benefits from this sudden and complete change in my mindset about COVID, one of them might be that I started paying more attention to actual COVID data. I really started trying to figure out how actual COVID data was being presented to people. And I would try to use that data -- data from state health departments, mostly -- to try and present new insights that would help me confirm for myself, and, maybe, also for others, what was really going on during this pandemic.
I actually am proud of some of the threads I would write over 2020 and 2021 that were based on actual COVID data. I think I did a good job with some of these threads.
Another strange benefit from the trauma I felt, overlaying my own life with the George Floyd protests, is that, having spent 12 days straight refreshing and refreshing my Twitter timeline on my phone, I finally realized how addictive my Twitter app could be, and especially during times like this. And I realized it was hurting me mentally and physically.
So on June 8, 2020, I uninstalled my Twitter app from my phone. This was definitely one of the best things I've ever done for my emotional, mental, and physical well being. And, most likely, I would not have uninstalled Twitter (as well as a few other social media apps, by the way) from my phone had it not been for my seeing how addicted I'd become to my phone as the George Floyd protests were developing.
In terms of how my fears about the effects of the George Floyd protests on the COVID pandemic in America played out, I'm still a little unsure.
For sure, there were certain areas of America -- most notably Oregon -- where protesters did not take as many safety precautions and ended up causing COVID to spike sharply in their region. This is undeniable if you look at the data. Additionally, if you look at places like Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Georgia, you can also see huge increases in COVID cases, and, in some places, deaths, that started just about in line with the time frame that would be expected following the George Floyd protests.
However, the George Floyd protests didn't lead to a huge surge in COVID cases, as was my personal fear. The transmission rates were worse, but not as catastrophic as I'd feared -- thanks, most likely, again, to the safety precautions the protesters took.
And the virus didn't mutate as much as I thought it would. I never express this very clearly in any of my threads. But my fear was that the virus would adapt itself to younger bodies during the protests and become more dangerous to young people. But the virus never adapted that way. And so my fears were totally unfounded there.
So I was wrong. And, as I've implied above. I even knew I was wrong.
But something about the trauma of my own life, plus the protests, really just made me dig my heels in with the standard pre-protest COVID messaging, so that, even when I knew I was wrong, I just kept yelling and screaming about the disaster that was waiting for us all due to the millions of people across the US -- all protesting for justice, all protesting for the police to stop killing unarmed people, in broad daylight, in front of cameras, out on the streets of America.
I knew I was wrong. But my brain was broken. And, honestly, it probably still is, even in May of 2021.
Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.
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