In this two-part series, we speak to a few people engaged in organizing and political education projects about their experiences trying to incorporate covid protections into their existing organizing work, wins and losses they've encountered, and why it's so important for the left to take covid seriously, even as the public health emergency comes to a close.

In Part 1, we speak with Alex (beginning at 03:30), a student organizer at a university in the northeast US, and Reina Sultan (beginning at 54:30), a co-creator of 8 to Abolition. Part 2 will be released as next week's public episode.

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)

Alex M. 0:01

What I really needed to hear when protections started to be ripped away in 2022 was that it's not too late. And that just because we're three years or more into a pandemic, does not mean that it's too late to start organizing, or it's too late to join organizing around the pandemic.

Raia Small 0:20

Personally, I feel like I can't really trust an organization that's not taking on such a huge issue that is affecting everyone, but particularly poor people, working class people, people of color, people with disabilities, elders, like people who are already oppressed in so many ways.

Becca 0:37

Every chain of transmission that is broken is valuable, every person that doesn't get sick, that doesn't lose that week of work, or doesn't become disabled or die, from the minor-est of inconveniences, to the greatest of losses, every single one of those things is valuable.

Death Panel 1:19

[intro music]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:19

Welcome to the Death Panel.

To support the show and get access to all of our weekly bonus episodes, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism, or request it at your local library, and follow us at @deathpanel_.

So today we have a very special episode for you.

Artie Vierkant 1:45

Yeah, so today's show is very different from usual. With the public health emergency ending May 11th, and the conversation we've been having about how the end of many of aspects of the federal COVID response is going to affect our social movements, we thought that right now would be a really important time to talk to a few organizers and political activists or advocates about exactly that. Specifically, while some of the people you're about to hear from across these interviews have done some COVID specific work, for this we wanted to talk to organizers who work on other issues actually, about the importance for the left and for social movements in general in taking COVID seriously, and everything that entails. You know, what successes have they had, and what failures, and especially what gives them resolve to keep pushing for COVID protections in their organizing, even when some of their comrades aren't on the same page. And so, just a heads up, this kind of unfolds a little bit more like an oral history than some of the other things that we do. Bea did some great interviews for this. And we did it this way because we want to kind of get this snapshot, I think, of where people are at and what they've been doing.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:57

Yeah, like in this moment.

Artie Vierkant 2:58

Yeah, exactly.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:59

So another thing that makes this a little unusual, this is going to be a two part episode. This week, in part one, we'll hear from Alex, a student organizer at a university in the Northeast, and from Reina Sultan, a co-creator of 8 to Abolition. And then next week's public episode will be part two.

Artie Vierkant 3:20

Yep. So we hope you appreciate this. Patrons, we will see you in the patron feed on Monday. And without further ado, here are the interviews.

Death Panel 3:35

Interview one - Bea interviews Alex

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 3:49

Okay, so first to just start us off for the tape, do you mind introducing yourself with a like, my name is, my pronouns are, and I'm an organizer with -- fill in the blank.

Alex M. 4:00

Yeah, sure. My name is Alex, I use she and they pronouns. And I'm a labor solidarity organizer and mutual aid organizer, based out of a university in the northeast. I do a lot of work around advocating for better COVID protections, organizing with worker groups and unions on my campus, and also trying to merge those conversations, and seeing how we can bring better disability justice and CODE practices into all of our organizing spaces on my campus and in my city.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 4:31

So do you mind talking briefly just about some of the organizing that you've been doing in the last year, maybe some specific issues that, either in the COVID arena or in things that are not, you know, COVID specific, but obviously are going to touch on COVID because of the context of the virus right now?

Alex M. 4:49

Yes. So for most of 2022, I was involved in an undergrad labor solidarity campaign on my campus to support the dining hall workers on our campus who were organizing for a better contract. So their labor contract with the university was set to expire at the end of August of 2022. And myself and other organizers on campus came together at the end of 2021, beginning of 2022, to re-form this labor solidarity coalition that sort of comes up out of the ashes every five years on campus to support the dining hall workers' negotiations and contract fight. So we were building that campaign and trying to win that contract fight all throughout the spring and the summer of 2022. And we did end up winning a really awesome contract at the beginning of September.

And you know, shortening that entire history down into something a little bit more manageable, a lot of what the workers were fighting for -- I mean, pretty basic, you know, labor improvements, like higher wages to keep up with the cost of living, which is obviously skyrocketing for a lot of reasons, COVID included. And then some other things that were embedded in that contract fight that we had to deal with were, for example, like sick leave and call out policies were a huge, huge bargaining topic, because what was happening is that our dining hall workers, you know, obviously, they unfortunately like the rest of us were getting sick, and having to take time off work. And the dining hall contractor company, instead of replacing those call outs with other workers so that the existing workers would have like a normal, humane pace of work, were making dining hall workers work like the amount of three or four jobs basically at once, to make up for their coworkers calling out sick.

Obviously, during a pandemic where like a lot of people are calling out sick, that is happening quite often. So that was something that was straining them a lot. So by the time that we won this contract, in September of 2022, they were able to win the first guaranteed call out policy in their union's history. So we were able to get the contractor and the university to agree that all call outs would be replaced. So that was a really big win. I think it also shows that, you know, so many of the conversations we're having in labor spaces about over-work are super, super impacted by the pandemic, especially like in a university setting where all of us as college students are diseased [laughing] basically, because we're living in close quarters and going to the dining hall, that's also close quarters, common eating spaces. And those workers who are serving us and feeding us are the ones who are also bearing the brunt of, you know, how much virus activity there is on campus. And so, you know, there's that and then there's also, you know, just general mutual aid organizing on campus. I guess I should say, the mutual aid network that we have on our campus was founded in 2020, in response to the pandemic.

So it started, you know, from that crisis, because students who were being removed from campus very suddenly to go into quarantine, some of them just did not have the resources for that sudden change. And so kind of sprung up in response to that crisis. And we've stuck around and one of the main things that we focus on is food insecurity, because the university doesn't guarantee three meals a day, which I have opinions about, obviously. And so, you know, we've done things like distribute face shields and masks while at our sort of food pantry type project locations. And one of the things that I started working on personally, at the end of 2022, in response to my university rolling back pretty much all of our protections and resources on COVID in spring of 2022, is creating a subproject within that sort of mutual aid network to focus specifically on creating a COVID response from the bottom up, once the university basically abandoned us.

So it kind of is all connected, because the food insecurity question and the COVID question and the labor question are all intertwined. So it's been pretty interesting working at the intersection of all of those issues. And I think having all of those issues bumping up against each other in the university setting has -- has been an interesting place to work on incorporating precautions and protections into organizing, because it's kind of like -- not a bubble, because my university is in the middle of like a big city, it's not like isolated off on like a tall green hill. But it's been a testing ground for me as an organizer to see like who are the people who are most likely to be open to hearing about precaution taking and why it's important. And I'm sure we'll get into this later as well, but you know, like the undergrad and I guess just campus wide solidarity campaign that we conducted to support the dining hall workers was done in a very like COVID conscious, COVID impacted way. I mean, all of our organizing was hybrid, our weekly meetings where we were organizing and planning and stuff, were all on Zoom.

All of our meetings were hybrid accessible until -- until the spring when mask mandates were dropped at my school. Of course, we were all masking because it was a university campus, and so we had a mask mandate. And even after the university dropped the mask mandate, we kept asking people to mask when they came to our meetings, and even to our big rallies. I mean, we had rallies on campus of, you know, upwards of 300 people. And we made sure that we brought masks to that and ask everyone to mask and we were able to, you know, kind of as the campaign heated up, even though the university abandoned us in terms of taking care of us, we just continued that expectation within our bubble of the labor group.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 11:16

Absolutely. Wonderful perspective on all of the work that you've been involved in, and the fact that, you know, you can't actually separate COVID out from any of these other issues that so many people are working on, obviously, like it's central to a lot of labor issues, but within the context of a university, you know, especially a university that's in the middle of the city, considering the ways that, you know, as you're saying, the university kind of acts as this viral vector within a city that could already have kind of these higher concentrations and other populations that are going to drive it. You know, one thing I think that's often under-discussed in terms of like thinking of the college population too is also that this is like one of the biggest underinsured populations that we're thinking of in the country, like that are concentrated in one area. You know, so many college kids like have insurance that they can't literally afford to use. And so I think this is a really beautiful way of kind of laying out how all of these things are ultimately tied together. Now, you mentioned that, for example, the mutual aid work that you're involved in only started after COVID. And it seems like y'all have sort of taken the lessons of COVID towards sort of how you're going to organize the organization of your organizing, and carried that through, which is a little unusual, but really great to hear about. Do you mind sort of talking about maybe just sort of specifically, since you were not doing this organizing necessarily with this group before COVID, and it sort of sprung up in response, do you mind talking through, you know, as you were setting it up, and making decisions about how you were going to run meetings, to prioritize making things accessible via hybrid, via mask mandate -- obviously, these are not the choices that were the norm. So do you mind briefly sort of talking about how some of these decisions were made internally early on, sort of what the discussion was like around why it was advantageous towards your political goals to be making sure that not only were you sort of addressing COVID in the scope of organizing, but also that your organizing was accessible and aware and responsive of the actual reality of COVID?

Alex M. 13:31

Yeah. I mean, I will say, I wasn't around at the very beginning, the founding of the mutual aid network, because I came to my university fall of 2020. And so they basically started it up, I'm pretty sure, during the spring semester when everything went down. So I wasn't a part of a decision making -- the decision making back then. But I will say, like, a little bit of a perspective on that from my labor group that sprung back up at the beginning of 2022, is it was -- it almost wasn't even a decision. It was just the way that we were doing everything else, if I could say that. Like at that point, our institution, our university, was -- this is in 2020 and 2021, had some of the best and most well thought out COVID policies that I had heard of. I mean, we were getting PCR tested for free, twice a week. It was mandatory up until 2022. And, you know, of course, they installed like, I don't know, some state of the art camera system, so we could all have Zoom, hybrid classes and all of that, and mask mandates on top of that. And so when we went about organizing our meetings and making choices about how we would meet and what those safety precautions would be like, we kind of just did what we were doing everywhere else, which is like making sure that everyone had an option to come online, because that's how we were doing our classes, for example. And that's how a lot of clubs had adjusted as well at my school when the pandemic hit.

And so, I hate to say that we were just kind of following institutional models, because that doesn't sound very like politically left, but you know, at some points, at least my university at some point, thought that the best way to save face and save money was to actually be really good on COVID. And that didn't change until 2022. So all of these networks or organizing groups that sprung up, that I was a part of, in response to COVID, or in response to conditions that were exacerbated by COVID, were sort of shaped by the fact that we were in a place, in an institution, that was doing the right thing. We were getting tested multiple times a week, for free, regardless of whether we're insured, and we were required to wear masks. So it was sort of an easy transition to do that internally as well. And what changed when the university dropped its precautions, stopped requiring masks, stopped providing free testing, was because of our values, and because of what we were organizing toward, I mean, obviously we were pissed about it, which is why myself and other people formed our own COVID Response Team. But we didn't blindly follow that. And we knew that they were dropping things because it was more cost effective, and they weren't worried about alumni and parents and all of that getting on their asses anymore. And so we just continued to do those best practices, that continued to be best practices, even when the institution decided they weren't anymore. So I think it's kind of unique in that sense, because I was lucky that we formed while those things were still sort of socially, publicly common sense, at least -- at least in left spaces, or at least in organizing spaces.

Obviously, we weren't organizing with any anti-maskers, [laughing] or anti-vaxers. So we were able to kind of hold those practices over because we recognized that we weren't just like following orders, we weren't doing it because we were forced to, we were doing it because we wanted to protect each other, we wanted to make sure that we were staying as safe as we could, because we knew that that was conducive to continuing our organizing, and also being as inclusive as possible. So when the university decided to stop protecting us, that didn't mean we stopped protecting each other. Not to say that there aren't people who just sort of slowly transitioned to whatever everyone else in their community or their friends or what their classmates were doing. That did definitely happen, especially toward the end of 2022. And I'm sure we'll have a conversation about that. But, you know, like at least those of us who had some sort of like influence or leadership in those groups, who had some kind of language to describe why it was important to keep protecting each other, and we were tuned in to disability justice and health justice, we were able to sort of nudge the people around us and say, like, hey, you know, this is still important. Even if many people, or some people in our groups, were sort of just following the line of what the university said was safe and okay.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 18:25

Well, it's almost like -- I really appreciated how you put it, like oh, well, we weren't just like following orders. It's almost like, because the university had such stringent and strict COVID precautions in place, those norms and that kind of structural apparatus for the protection seems to have facilitated your organizing, allowing y'all to sort of push through and have COVID sort of addressed as a given, partially because of this kind of like structural facilitation, you know? I think it's definitely one of the reasons why, like for example, I think we argue on Death Panel often that a mask mandate is not about enforcement, but about like sort of education and messaging and communication, and also sort of setting those structural standards to help free people up, because, you know, it does suck up a lot of time that -- you know, we always have very limited time that we're going to be able to devote to organizing. Most people are not full-time paid organizers who do this as their job, right? So we're always fitting it in around all sorts of other things, around life, around health, like whatever. And one of the things that what you're saying is really making me think about is sort of how when these sort of structural, facilitated COVID protections started being rescinded, how much more work and labor was required from organizers to be able to continue the work that they were already doing, that had to go into sort of negotiating making things COVID safe. And I think that's a really interesting thing to sort of consider from the perspective of especially like Dean Spade's work on mutual aid, you know, that sort of considers like counterinsurgency and the time it takes us. Now, you posted on Twitter that your org has had some success with maintaining these practices and have actually adopted guidelines, and you made these available online for folks who might want to use them themselves. Can you explain sort of how the process of the guidelines went, sort of what -- when the university abandoned y'all, obviously you had this template that you were working with, of sort of the practices that you had been using, but what were sort of the conversations around internally sort of how you were structuring these guidelines, sort of what the priorities were in setting the guidelines? And did you run into sort of any, you know, issues or conflicts during that process?

Alex M. 21:01

Yeah. I would say, just personally, I've always been I guess a little optimistic, to the point of maybe being naive. And so it took me a few months from when all of our precautions dropped off in the spring -- I guess I should say, I think the social shift, about like the social expectations that we have of each other, of who is taking precautions, who is mask wearing? Is it cool? Is it still a thing that we do? I think it took a few months, at least on my campus, for even the left organizers or the left-y community on my campus, to start sort of slowly just dropping those things away. So through the labor campaign, for example, even when the university dropped precautions, it was still sort of common sense in our group, at least, throughout the summer. It was really with the start of the fall semester in September of 2022 that I personally started to notice it wasn't common sense anymore. And so I personally just started having to play catch up a little bit, because I had thought, naively, that the values that we had in terms of protecting our workers and taking care of each other, and all these things that we claim to be for, would very directly translate to these common sense measures, like wearing a mask to a meeting, or using the very few, but using the free tests that are available to us on campus - rapid tests, for example. And basically, it took me by surprise that this wasn't common sense anymore. And that came, I guess, from just all of us as students starting a whole new semester in the fall.

And all of us, including myself being surrounded by, you know, 90% to 95% un-masked classrooms, every single day, with very unreliable remote options, things like that. And so when you as an individual, or let's say us as students, in the time that we're not organizing, when you're surrounded by everyone doing the popular thing, which is erasing COVID and pretending it doesn't exist, when you return to that organizing space, and you come back together, my theory is that we're all sort of just slowly being socially encouraged to just give up, when we're all in those majority un-masked, majority erasure spaces. So I think personally, that's what probably shook some of that group -- group-wide common COVID sense that we used to have. And so how we went about coming up with the guidelines, and I can't even say we honestly, because I think it was mostly just me realizing that we had lost -- we had lost the assumption that that was just what we did, because more and more of us were venturing out into a campus and into a world that just didn't care anymore.

And that was starting to reflect in our space. And myself being someone who's very, very stubborn, but also, you know, listens to the Death Panel, and reads the People's CDC Weekly Weather Report and stays up to date on what's going on, I decided that it wasn't enough for me to just assume that it was common sense anymore. I needed to write this down and to pitch it to the people that I organize with. Because what would end up happening as we were planning events, for example, during the fall semester, was we would plan an event and, you know, sort of toward the end of the event planning, if I didn't say, oh, yeah, and by the way, are we putting that we're going to require masks on the flyer - if I didn't bring that up, many times it wouldn't be brought up. And it wasn't that people were hostile, or that they didn't want to wear a mask, they just weren't thinking about it.

So I started realizing that all of that effort that was placed onto me and a few other organizers who were keeping COVID in mind, it was taking a lot of energy. And honestly just a lot of like emotional energy to have to remind people all the time that it still existed. And so as a way to sort of make that easier on myself, and also just to open up a conversation with my fellow organizers, I decided before we started meeting again in the spring, to just write down what I thought would be a good plan. And I didn't just pull this stuff, like you said, I didn't just pull it like out of thin air, I thought about what common sense precautions we had had at school, before the university gave up. And I also just modeled safer gatherings guidelines from some of the guidance that's come out of the People's CDC, for example, and just other public health folks and health justice centered folks who are talking about, what are layers of protection. So how can we just apply multiple layers to try to catch as many infections as possible, or to try to prevent as many infections as possible, I should say. So I took basic inspiration from layers of protection, safer gatherings guidelines, and I just sort of adapted them to what resources we have on campus. And that's something that I really emphasized as well, or tried to emphasize in the template that I put out, is that if you tell a college student to go get PCR tested, they're gonna laugh in your face. It's just not something that is accessible to, let's say, an uninsured college student. It's expensive, it's really hard to find for some people, especially in my city, there's not a lot of even free PCR testing sites in the middle of the city. The city is not doing a good job of advertising the ones that exist, and they defunded most of them over the summer anyways. So, for example, you kind of just have to use what you have access to, and try to use it in the most adapted way possible to maximize the potential of any one layer of protection.

But it also really depends on your context. So for me on a college campus, in the middle of a big city, I'm working with people who really just want to go out and have fun with their friends. And they're going to be in classrooms of 50 and 100 people with no masks on, because they have to be in order to get their degree. It didn't seem feasible for me to come to them with guidelines that say, don't spend time indoors un-masked around crowds. Because the truth is, if we tried to make that a guideline, we would have no organizers in my area on my campus. But we could, for example, and we did, pool some of our money to buy higher quality masks. We bought a bunch of KN95s to make sure that everyone at our meetings have access to a higher filtration mask. And we, you know, put together a list of free rapid and PCR testing sites, we put some isolation guidance on there as well. But again, like for example, isolating after you're sick when you're a college student with no isolation housing, and your professors have like, you get two days of sick leave per semester and then I'm failing you out of the class, like that's just not going to happen. Like most college students, when they have COVID, at this point in time, in 2023, are not able to stay home from work or stay home from class for the 10 to 14 plus days that you need to fully recover.

So we kind of just -- or I should say, I adapted layers of protection to what I thought my friends and my fellow organizers would be capable of doing, so that when I came to them, and I presented these guidelines to them, and I said, hey, like, I think we should talk about this, that it would be achievable and doable for the people that I was talking to. And I would say like I got some concern from some people about the aspect of in-person community building and how important that was for building connections and making sure that our organizing efforts work long-term. And the reason I got that concern was because I initially proposed that just our weekly sort of day-to-day organizing meetings be fully on Zoom.

And that's the way we had done it in the past, but we did do hybrid in the fall and people did seem to enjoy that. So I said okay, we should you make one of the two meetings a week hybrid to make sure that people have an opportunity to gather together and you know, just have that mingling community building time. And, you know, if we still have that point in those guidelines about masking, then sure, like that's a concession that we can make to facilitate more community building. And then I think other folks were concerned initially about the guideline about wearing like a KN95 or better when we meet because, again, like to a college student, we don't have free mask distribution on campus for higher filtration masks, it's only surgical masks.

So requiring that without actually providing the means to get a mask or to get multiple, right, because you theoretically shouldn't re-use them that much, that was a concern for some folks. And so we really made sure to say like, okay, before we stipulate this, we need to make sure that we can provide free access. And so that's when we came up with the plan to pool some of our money and use some money that we had gotten from some like fundraising type stuff, and pool it and put that together and buy some. But yeah, after that, I mean, we haven't had an official coalition wide vote yet, still working on that. But overall, like it's kind of just been informally adopted so far, because once we plan an event and we bring the KN95s, and we hand them to people, I mean, that's how you do a mask mandate, right? Like you just make it as easy as possible for people to wear it, and they just will, when they're part of a community where it's expected and it's celebrated, instead of just being something that you don't talk about.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:43

Yeah, absolutely. I so appreciate you laying out that process and talking through especially sort of the actual really difficult decisions that have to be made in terms of like how to make COVID protections work for different contexts and scenarios and groups of people. I mean, this is ultimately often one of the arguments that's used against COVID protections, right, is like the need for being able to tailor it, right? But it's so obvious that that need also seems to often arise out of the lack of like more formal, broad federal norms, for example, or more formal institutional norms. So it is one of those beautiful examples of like kind of the COVID social issue being created by the COVID structural issue, but then everything's blamed on, you know, oh, well, people just won't listen, you know? Do you have any specific advice or sort of, you know, any lessons that you learned from this process that you would want to pass on to other organizers?

Alex M. 32:13

For sure. I would say, it's really hard to do this work alone. And so even though I'm one of the only people, for example, in my organizing group that was really paying attention to COVID, or like, you know, as a crazy COVID lady, as I like to say, what really helped me actually start something, like actually start a response project, actually bring these guidelines together, was having guidance from other people who were doing that work. So I couldn't have created my guidelines without reading the People's CDC's safer guidelines, or reading advice from organizers who are doing this work on other college campuses, for example. For example, the COVID response project that I am working on right now, we are about to begin representing our school in the COVID Safe Campus Ambassador Program.

And so COVID Safe Campus is this national organization that helps bring people who are doing the same work as me and my friends and my fellow organizers, helps bring us closer with people who are doing that work everywhere. And that is so, so, so important. Because feeling isolated and feeling dejected in this work is like the number one way that we just stop sometimes. And I mean, I'm of the opinion that it's okay to like feel your feelings and process things, and at the same time, like it's so important to get guidance and support and community from people who are doing the work in other ways. Whether that be, you know, like becoming involved with or just learning from and reading materials from a larger national organization, or connecting just personally and making friends with more COVID conscious people in your city or in your region, regardless of whether they're also involved in the organizing. Just having those personal connections where you can feel understood, and also kind of having those organizing connections where you can bounce ideas off of each other and like not reinvent the wheel, right? Like, I didn't create that template out of thin air and that would have been 20 times harder if I had tried to do that. It becomes so much easier when you lean on people who are already doing the work. So that would be my advice to people, is like even if you think you're alone in caring, you're not. You just have to reach out and, you know, be loud enough for the people around you who are too scared to say anything, to also say hey, I also think this is wrong. And I also think we should join up and help each other and do something about it. Kind of in a both like ushy-gushy friendship way [laughing], and then also just in like a organizer to organizer solidarity way.

And I really, really hope that in 2023, we're going to see more COVID conscious labor organizers connect with more COVID conscious abolitionists, connect with more disability justice advocates, connect with more racial justice advocates who are also doing this work, and sort of transform our movements and transform our organizing from the inside out, by just finding each other, sharing resources, and jumping into the work wherever we are.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 35:29

That's beautiful, Alex. I really appreciate the way you put that. Let's see, I don't want to take up too much of your time.

Alex M. 35:31

Oh, that's okay. You can take up as much time as you'd like.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 35:33

Alright. I have three more questions real quick.

Alex M. 35:37

Okay.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 35:38

But I'll try and combine these two, because they kind of are one question, which is, can you talk a little bit about why you personally feel that COVID is an important issue to adapt your organizing to? And what would you say to someone who identifies as being on the political left who really kind of thinks that like COVID is really not a big deal anymore? Maybe, you know, because that was sort of your advice to organizers who see the way you do. So do you have any advice for organizers, I guess, who don't, who see kind of the opposite landscape regarding COVID?

Alex M. 36:13

Yeah. And I've definitely had these conversations in person as well. Well, the first thing is, I think ableism and the sort of propensity to "forget about," but in reality, like abandon and push out disabled and immunocompromised people from our movements, has been a trend and ingrained in a lot of left movement structures for far, far too long. And I think part of that is due to us sort of unconsciously, or maybe even consciously sometimes, adopting capitalism's idea of what it means to be productive or to win. Sometimes it feels like if you are not able -- not to create a pun -- but like if you're not able to get out in the streets and like go protest in person and walk around and make noise with your body and your voice, or you're not able to go canvass like 20, 30 houses an hour or, you know, just all of these things that are very physical and activities that are typically seen as the peak of organizing, or the peak of leftist organizing productivity -- I think sometimes we like -- the ableism is sort of baked into some of those ideas of how we think about effective organizing. And I also think it's baked into some stereotypes, and some like negative connotations of slacktivism, right?

Like, what does it mean to be a social media activist or someone who does their work online? And that's some of the criticism that we get as COVID conscious organizers - that we're chronically online - because so many of the people that are most impacted by COVID, or most at risk of COVID complications, are online right now, because that's one of the only safe spaces that we have. So first of all, I guess I would say, it's important as leftists, and as organizers to acknowledge that, and to recognize that maybe some of the logics that we've been operating under this whole time deserve to be picked apart and opened up by this conversation around the pandemic, and that that's okay, and that's good, and we should be having those conversations. I don't know that everyone is up for that self reflection [laughing]. Maybe not. But I think that's important.

I also think I've been able to reach people by emphasizing the disability justice and also economic justice impact of it. So I mentioned, for example, like us as college students not really being able to isolate. Well, for example, I have some friends who, even right now, they get sick, regardless of whether or not it's COVID, and they can't financially afford not to go to work. And so sometimes the way that I present it is, if we all just take these basic steps to try to protect each other from getting sick, whether short term or long term, that protects your ability -- I mean, it protects your pockets. Like it protects your ability to keep going to work. It protects your ability to keep participating and organizing in the way that you want. And I know that that's kind of contradictory to what I just said, where like some of that is kind of this productivity or work based ideology, but it does appeal to people.

It does appeal to some people when you tell them like, hey, you know, I'm giving you these examples of people who are being taken out of work or taken out of their organizing life or whatever, by these really severe impacts of this illness. And our movement and our work, if we want to keep doing things that require being together in person, like a rally or a march or canvassing or whatever, we need to make sure that we're able to do that. So it's kind of contradictory, right, like, not every argument that you make to people, or other leftists or other organizers, is going to be like 100% based in like the truest and most pure form of like unpacking the ableism in leftist movements that you really believe. Sometimes it's like, hey, I know you care about being able to get up, walk out of your apartment and go to a protest. What if you couldn't do that anymore?

And sometimes it is about like appealing to what that person cares about, even if you don't agree with the underlying logic that an in person protest attendee is doing some higher, more pure form of activism than someone planning a social media campaign or something similar. So it's kind of that. And then I also think it's kind of -- I've had conversations before, where I mentioned something that you said, like, well, if the institution doesn't care anymore, then that kind of gives us the impression that it's just this like natural social phenomenon, or like that people just don't care anymore, because they suddenly decided to just not care anymore. And so I hear that a lot from fellow organizers sometimes. They're like, well, I do care. And I really do want to do better. And I do want us to have better COVID protections. But you know, no one's gonna listen to us, or no one cares anymore. And that's hard stuff to hear. Because you kind of just want to shake people sometimes and be like, I know, that's why we have to do it. Like, that's our job. Which it doesn't feel good, right?

Like, it doesn't feel good as organizers to have to like take up the mantle of a failed public health response. It doesn't feel fair, it doesn't feel nice. But then again, like we've been doing that, like that's the whole point of being an organizer is you take up the mantle, the responsibility, to help create a better world where existing institutions have abandoned you. And so sometimes, that's the sort of framing that I do as well. It's like, you really despise this university, or this government structure, for their failures in this, this, and this arena, you know, like I try to talk to my fellow organizers about this at my school because our university does all sorts of fucked up shit, like gentrification and funding like warmongering companies, and like all of this awful, awful stuff that so many of us just very clearly despise. And so sometimes I'll lay it out for them and I'll say, you know, the same people who are working with Raytheon, and gentrifying this historically Black neighborhood in our city, are the same people who are taking away your right to not get infected, just to get your degree, or just to organize with people on your campus.

And so I try to include it in the conversation of issues that they're already familiar with being sort of anti-establishment around. And I've also just noticed that sometimes it's not the logical arguments that reach people. Sometimes, it's just me being really, really honest about how dejected and disappointed I feel, and how scared I am. And this is just something that I have noticed myself, because I'm someone who really likes to be friends with the people I organize with and form genuine relationships with them. And so a lot of times, this is not like professional organizer agitating conversations. A lot of the times, it's just me sitting down with people who I consider my friends and saying, like it really sucks that I have to ask you guys to mask every single time, it makes me feel really alone. It makes me feel like you don't care about my health. And those are the types of conversations, obviously, that sometimes go very, very badly. And sometimes people are like you know what, like that made me rethink. And I've had people say that to me.

I've had people, fellow organizers in both the labor space and the mutual aid space, decide to start masking again, because of a conversation I've had with that. So sometimes it's not about like professional organizer, Alex, talking to them on like a leftist sort of channel. Sometimes it's just me, as a friend, coming to them and being like, I'm scared, I'm frustrated, I wish things were different. And just coming to them on a person to person level and saying, like, I need us to do better. And that's obviously not going to be applicable to, you know, like every single political group or organization, especially people who have sort of different ideas about how organizing should happen, and what relationships you should have with each other. But that's something that I've encountered as well that has been particularly effective, is just trying to reach people on like a friendship level, on a personal level. And that's hard work. Like that's really hard emotional work.

But I sort of see it as my responsibility, especially someone who's not immunocompromised, and so I have certain privileges where I can be in certain spaces and talk to certain people, where it would be super, super unsafe for someone else to be in that space to try to convince people. So I try to see that as, I'm taking on this responsibility because there are people who can't be here, and I want them to be here. Like it's important that they're a part of what we're doing and not -- I don't want to leave those people out. So I definitely see it as a personal responsibility as well.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:05

I think it's so important to have those really risky conversations. But there is so much at stake in so many of them, you know, both in terms of like organizing, and also your social life, as you're saying, and I really appreciate what you were saying about wanting to make sure, to kind of -- as someone who can still be in the room, kind of make your comrades aware that there are immunocompromised people who are not going to be able to show up and contribute because of structural and physical situations that we're all living through. But I think, you know, it's nice to take that off of like the person who has to sort of advocate for personal access. I think it definitely, you know, it's -- I think it's definitely something that like a lot of people who are immunocompromised feel that like all of their friends have sort of abandoned them, right? And these are really risky conversations to have, because sometimes just not bringing it up, you like hope it'll pass and your friend will just get over it. But, you know, it's difficult, but it's so important, as you're saying. So as a last question, what gives you hope right now? What keeps you going when the nihilists are sort of burying you in the well, no one's gonna listen to us anyways -- what keeps you from sort of giving in to that rhetoric?

Alex M. 46:30

Yeah. Well, I think about where I was six months ago, like I was really demoralized, I saw like no way out of this. I just thought it would be too hard, emotionally, and capacity wise to start organizing around COVID. And six months later, I am doing it. So I think about that, personally. So like that gives me hope, because I feel like if I can process those emotions and get to working, regardless of, you know, how doomer-ish, I feel, I think a lot of people have the potential to do that. And also what gives me hope is that the work is already happening. And just because people in traditional leftist spaces aren't talking about it, or it's not happening within their point of view, it doesn't mean it's not happening. I think the work has been happening, both kind of at a grassroots level with a bunch of, you know, disabled, immunocompromised, and at risk people starting these conversations. I mean, obviously, since the beginning of the pandemic, but especially when, you know, back to normal-ism came around in a huge wave in 2022, like people started talking about how bullshit it was. And now those conversations have blossomed into some really, really amazing work. I mean, there are like mask block groups and like resource distribution groups all throughout the US, and I'm sure other countries as well, that are doing amazing work getting PPE and getting resources into people's hands.

I know Mandate Masks US is doing some great work as well, like collating all of those resources, and making sure that people can access, you know, those people that are doing the work at their local level. There's great work happening in terms of like providing alternative -- I should say alternative pandemic information and summarizing it from a health justice perspective, like you guys have. And then there's also great work happening in terms of like lobbying -- I shouldn't say lobbying, because it's kind of a charged word. But there's a lot of great work happening to try to change these policies, and to say, actually, we're not going to accept that this is all we can do. So you know, there's people trying to do that at a university level, like COVID Safe Campus, and there's people, you know, calling on the federal government and calling on government agencies to do better. And I think there's a lot of potential there. I do think it's going to take a lot more buy in from more people. But just depending on where you are and, you know, what social media communities you're connected with, it's really easy, I think, to feel helpful at times, because there are so many people that care, and that are angry, and they're fired up.

And so many people are tapping into health justice and disability justice and what it means to have inclusive movements because of the pandemic, and because that's shifted their mindset. And so I'm very, very hopeful, because the work is already happening. And it's catching on. And so my hope is that from people hearing about myself and other people who are doing this work, that it starts a chain reaction, like it happened for me, where it took me seeing the strength of other people who were standing up and saying actually, this is bullshit, we deserve better - it took me seeing that to feel like I was capable of doing something.

And I hope that that's what people will take away is like, there are people in your city, in your region, or at least in the same internet space as you that do care, they are doing this work, they are getting material resources into people's hands, and they're trying to change policies. And all you have to do is go out and find them and join them. And it's totally okay if you're still unsure, and you're scared, and you still feel unsafe, and you're still demoralized, and you still think like, oh my god, it's so awful that this has happened, you can still do the work while you feel like that.

You can hold the optimism and the pessimism at the same time. And that's -- at least that's my personal philosophy. Like I can't sit here and say that as an organizer, like my perspective hasn't shifted at all, when it comes to how many people have died, and how many people are being disabled by these awful policies. Like I can't sit here and say that that's not demoralizing to me. But instead of letting that sort of stop me, I'm trying to make sure that that fuels me, and that is fueling the work that I'm doing to make sure that fewer people -- fewer people have to die, fewer people have to become disabled because of the injustice that's happening.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 51:06

Alex, thank you so much. This has been absolutely wonderful. And I really appreciate especially your answer to the final question, because obviously, I'm biased, because I agree with you. But it is really hard work, to keep up a practice of hope. Especially I think, in work that touches on health justice, because we're dealing with such entrenched norms and systems and ways of doing things. And I think the kind of story of your sort of shift from COVID doomer to someone who's like doing that work themselves is a really good story that I hope will inspire some people to just at least realize that while we are going to sort of have these moments where the despair overwhelms the hope, like that these things, that there is a sort of light at the end of the tunnel, that there is like organizing after these low moments. And that learning how to sort of struggle together through them is really one of the most difficult tasks that we all sort of have to learn how to do over and over again, for the rest of our political lives. So I really appreciate you sort of taking the time to walk through in such detail and really share also, some of the, you know, messy nuts and bolts of like how you actually sorted through this and what you guys went through, because I think as you're speaking to, there is a kind of intimidating aspect to trying to incorporate COVID into whatever people are doing, because there is a kind of newness to it. There's the structural barriers. So I think what you've been able to tell me tonight is going to be really, really helpful to people that are feeling like, you know, there's no forward, there's no future. And that's ultimately kind of the mind killer, right? Like, that's what keeps us from organizing in the first place, is these kind of moments where we talk ourselves out of things. So I really appreciate that just personally.

Alex M. 53:06

Yeah, yeah. Of course. And like, just lastly, I would say, what I really needed to hear when protection started to be ripped away in 2022 was that it's not too late. And that just because we're three years or more into a pandemic, does not mean that it's too late to start organizing, or it's too late to join organizing around the pandemic. Because regardless of how long we're in this intense pandemic disease stage, the effects of this, and the issues it dredges up, and the people it touches, it's going to be around for the rest of our lives and beyond. So it's absolutely never too late to start jumping into this organizing, because the pandemic is more than just this initial, you know, spike of unpredictable disease. It's about everything that results from it, including the people who have gotten sick long-term because of unjust policies. So it's really important that we recognize like now is the best time, if we have the ability, and we have the resources, and we can find each other, now is the time. It's never too late.

Death Panel 54:32

Interview two - Bea interviews Reina

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 54:53

So, if you wouldn't mind just sort of starting off by doing like a, my name is blank, my pronouns are blank, and I'm an organizer with blank, so we just have it like on the tape.

Reina Sultan 55:04

Sure. My name is Reina Sultan, my pronouns are she/her, and I am one of the co-creators of 8 to Abolition, and a, I guess, movement journalist. I have complicated feelings with that term, but I guess that is what I am [laughing].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:20

I love it. We should never be comfortable with our titles, whether we give them to ourselves or whether they're given to us. So Reina, can you briefly talk about now, in the past, over time, sort of what are the issues that you've done work around? What are the things that you have sort of centered your political home and the way that you approach political education in your work and life?

Reina Sultan 55:45

Yeah,. I would say that the number one political issue that I work on, write about, and ideate on is police and prison abolition. So 8 to Abolition was obviously in response to the 8 Can't Wait campaign, which was a series of reformist ideas to allegedly try to stop police violence in the wake of the George Floyd murder. And a group of us came together to put together other things that one might put into place to get us closer towards a world without prisons and police. And then apart from that, a lot of my journalism is about abolition, and also the ways that the prison industrial complex is kind of like bleeding into our lives in ways that are maybe a little bit more insidious. And that can be anywhere from like surveillance of sex workers, to the ways that the family system works and how they separate people from their children. And then I did a little bit of mutual aid work, where when we first got -- this feels like 300 years ago -- when we first got the stimulus checks, I put out a call on social media like, hey, if you got a stimulus check and you have money, you can send it to me, and I will redistribute it. And I ended up getting 1000s and 1000s of dollars, just like via Venmo and Cash App. And then people would reach out to me on social media and tell me their story, even though I told them they didn't need to tell me anything, I would send it to them. And then I would send them money. And I did that for a while for both the first and the second stimulus checks. And then I just like posted proof of my like sending it out online. And I felt like that was a really good time for mutual aid. I miss those days.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 57:39

I know, honestly, that -- it just is such a good use of the stimulus money, right. And such a good example of how, you know, universal programs can actually offer us like so many opportunities for mutual aid, whether that's, you know, being able to like fund, you know, community clinics through something like Medicare for All, or you know, stimulus checks becoming a kind of redistributive fund informally and directly, during the time when everyone sort of needed it the most - though we all still definitely need that kind of support right now, and we're not getting it. And I guess to sort of speak to like maybe how COVID has required some change or adaptation, maybe in the way that you approach either thinking through your scope of coverage, organizing, in terms of like a kind of political agenda setting, how did COVID sort of change the scope of your focus?

Reina Sultan 58:35

Yeah. I think that in the beginning, it just became like something that I was also going to be writing about. Like when you're writing kind of like in the justice space, all of these intersecting issues and identities become important. So I think that I -- in the like earlier days of the pandemic, I wrote a piece about how like decarceration efforts are more important than ever now, because obviously as we know, there were times when the New York City prison system had the most COVID cases per capita of any other place in the world. And I'm not sure that that is still the case now, because we don't have reporting data anymore. But it just became something else that was obviously like affecting people who are already the most marginalized, more than it was affecting white people who were out and about and making a lot of money. And I was someone who was very lucky in the pandemic and very privileged because I work at a computer, so I was able to sit at home when there were a lot of other people who couldn't do that. And so it became very important for me, in writing, that it was clear like who was bearing the brunt of the pandemic,

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:48

Absolutely. Now, you've been putting a lot of work into trying to communicate online, you know, why COVID protections are so key to organizing and building community, sort of trying to centralize community care and accessibility. Can you talk about how that's been going? Have there been issues or conflicts with folks that you've organized with in the past, folks in your life? You know, are you sort of experiencing reactions or pushback to some of the ways that you've been trying to communicate about the pandemic, just publicly to folks using the platforms that you have access to?

Reina Sultan 1:00:22

Yeah. I think like one of the hardest things about the pandemic is that like it has forced those of us who care about maintaining protections to become experts in things that we never were or should have been. Like, I don't have a science background. I am obviously a journalist. And like that has helped me a lot in researching and like parsing through fact and fiction, but I never wanted to know about the air quality. Like I never wanted to have to understand what it means for a virus to have like, R10, or R18, or R0, and how like certain things are more virulent than other strains, like I don't want to know about that. But because of this like government abandonment, we're being forced to learn things like that. And I just think that is part of one of the hardest things for me to do, is that I spend all this time like trying to figure this out for myself. And then I realized that's when I -- oh, like I'm learning this, I might as well tell other people about it. Because in 2021, like when we first got the vaccines, I was not on the part of Twitter that was sharing the information that the government was not. And I was under the impression that like we were getting this vaccine, and we were going to go into a part of time when it was going to be safer.

And to a degree it was, because there were still other protections. Like we were still required to mask in almost all public spaces, there was still a lot of access to outdoor dining, there were hours at grocery stores where you could go where they were -- only like fewer people were allowed in and it was for immunocompromised and elderly people. So there were all of those protections, plus the introduction of the vaccines. So we did have a time, in New York at least, were incidence was like 1%, or 2%. And I felt like -- that I felt pretty safe, I was pretty certain that like wearing my mask on the subway, it would be fine because most other people would be and I probably wouldn't get COVID. And then when I did get COVID, it was on a plane where I was wearing a KN95, and there was -- no one else on the plane was wearing a mask and everyone was coughing, and I was like, okay, well, I guess it's over for me. And I was struck at how difficult it was for me to find any information about anything. And that's when I kind of started to seek it out on social media, and that's also when I started to post more like educational posts. Before that, I would say like the majority of my political education was being done in articles.

But I realized that there was such a gap in people's understanding about what this virus can do, how contagious it is, and what can happen to you after the acute stage of infection. So I just started posting, and I would say, overall, it's fine. Like [laughing], I'm not getting more hate than I usually do. Like, I'm usually talking about freeing everybody from prison. So it's like, there's enough people already who have --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:00:34

You're well-suited for this.

Reina Sultan 1:01:27

[laughing] Something to say to me, so it's not that different in the sense when it comes to like the hatred, but I am getting a lot more pushback from people who I would not expect it from. Like usually if I was writing about abolition, sure, I'd have some like liberals and then mostly like conservative trolls telling me like, oh, somebody's gonna come and kill you in your house. And I'm like, okay. But I feel like there's been more people who are self-proclaimed leftist who are saying some really hurtful and horrible things to me, and especially to people who are immunocompromised, and I am chronically ill and disabled to some degree, but I am not immunocompromised. And so like, I'm taking these precautions because I believe that I want to protect myself and also other people, but it's -- I'm not as in danger as some other people might be. But to me, that's not -- like that doesn't excuse us from taking precautions, because I care about other people [laughing].

Like it was important to me that -- that people were not getting infected by me and that I was not like trying to spread this disease, but then I became a lot more clear about how I could potentially be affected. And not that that changed my belief that I should protect others, but it did alter my feeling of like, I might be okay if I got infected. Because before I was like, okay, I am doing these things because I believe that I am not the most at risk person in my community, and so I am protecting the most at risk at all times. Like when I'm trying to do any type of work, I'm always trying to think about the person who is most affected by the state, by some kind of abandonment, by violence. And so I wasn't necessarily thinking about how I would be affected, because I thought, okay, I'm like normal, healthy, whatever - allegedly - but there is no normal. We are all humans, we are all at risk, we all probably have underlying conditions we don't even know about. I think people believe that disability is this foreign concept, and none of us can even get anywhere close to it. But most people are disabled in some way, even if they do not yet know it, and will likely become disabled at some point in their life. So it's not this far off idea.

And I think the faster people understand that we are all at risk, and of course, on varying spectrums of that, but it doesn't mean that it's not a risk to everyone. And to me, if you've been infected once, twice, three times, however, and you are not yet feeling the effects of that, that is luck. It is not you being built different. It's just luck. And I think once I understood that no one is spared from this, I became a lot more serious about educating people in a way that they could understand not only how their actions were affecting other people, which I think like a lot of this like we keep us safe messaging in the beginning of the pandemic was working and then stopped for some reason. But I think we -- a lot of people missed the part where it could affect them too.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07:20

Yeah. Are there any kind of difficult conversations that you had that actually worked out well, where you were able to take someone who, you know, might have been like, a little hostile, a little antagonistic, some of those like people you wouldn't expect to be pushing back against you - have you come out of any of those kinds of moments of pushback, like convincing the other person? Or are they sort of motivated right now to walk away? I think the push towards normalization is so heavy and hard that in a lot of instances, the kind of peer pressure, the social pressure is outweighing appeals to even just kind of like the most baseline kind of like, COVID is class war, this is about economic justice, you know, even like thinking about this in terms of wages and the workforce, right. Like that's even kind of failing for a lot of folks.

Reina Sultan 1:08:07

I think it's really hard. And I don't purport to have changed hearts and minds in a way that is meaningful. I will say that, to some degree, I have had success in the sense that I like have known people who had previously been taking precautions, and maybe like unmasked during the Great Unmasking, when a lot of us felt that things would be safer. And I've had success in taking like a harm reductionist approach -- I hesitate to call it that, because I just feel like it's selling ourselves short, like of what we can really do to prevent mass death and disability. But at the same time, like, if there is no big undertaking from the people, and no help from the state, the only thing I can think to do is take my cues from communities who have had to do things like this on their own before.

And so I think particularly like when we're thinking about drug use, like we're not telling people not to do drugs. So, though it is my preference that we don't do super spreading, I can't stop that myself. So the only thing I can do is to get people who might still be engaging in those activities, to take precautions at other times in their life, to lower the likelihood that their super spreader COVID event ends up spreading even more. So like what I usually try to do is if I know somebody who's like out at the clubs every single weekend, going out every moment of their life, like literally only existing in spaces where they probably are seeing people with a bunch of COVID all the time, is I'm like hey, you should wear a mask when you are in the grocery store and at the pharmacy and at the subway and at the doctor, because those are the places where people don't have a choice to be around you,. Like you're going to the bar, and all those people consented to be at the bar with you and your potential COVID, but the people on the subway who are going to cancer treatment did not consent to that.

And I have likened it often to like you would never get mad at somebody for asking you to like test your coke before you use it or something like that, like that's something that's normal in a party community. So I've tried to be like, so when you're like gonna test your coke for fentanyl, you could also just take a rapid test at the same time. They take the same amount of time to load, and you're kind of killing two birds with one stone. So I try to like link it to other things they already are doing, comparable to like -- like in the sex work community, obviously everybody is getting tested before shooting a new scene, and people who are doing full service get tested all the time, or use barriers. And so I try in those situations, like okay, you guys are taking all of these precautions when you're engaging in your job, because you know that you are trying to protect yourself in XYZ way.

So also do these things, even if it's imperfect, because the likelihood that you'll at least stop spreading it if you are having COVID at that moment will be lower. So it's just not perfect, but I've found it to work at least a little bit better. And then at least those people are wearing their mask on the subway. And it's like obviously, if we had a mandate on the subway, in the grocery store, all of these things would be circumvented, I could then work on people to try to get them to make their events safer, or things like that. But right now, my biggest focus, when I am talking to people about precautions is on these essential activities that we're locking disabled people, immunocompromised people and the elderly out of. And so I think that that's been my biggest success, I guess, is like getting people to kind of see how, okay, this small inconvenience to me is actually a big help to other people. And it's not stopping them from going to super spreader events, but the small wins I think are better than nothing. And then I've also had some success in like asking people to implement things before hosting people, like if someone's like, hey Reina, do you want to come to my house and watch a movie? And I can be like, oh, I actually will not come to your house and watch a movie unless everybody takes a PCR test before and we open the windows and have a HEPA filter on.

And either that person says okay, and does it or they're like, oh, I don't think that's going to happen and then never invites me to something again. Fine. Then I know we're not probably real friends. But it is my prerogative to at least make anywhere I am going as safe as possible. And then in the hopes that that person will then just do it again the next time they are having people over or want to hang out with someone. And it just like, is really arduous. Like, every day, I'm navigating this in my personal life, on top of what I'm posting on the internet. So it is pretty exhausting, because I am both just like trying to live and protect my community, and also like I feel this huge burden of showing people what they're not learning, because the truth is like any average person on the street has genuinely no idea what COVID does to you - long term, short term, anything, because the media and the state are not, except for business media, are not explaining what is actually happening to you.

So most people's only understanding of death and disability as it relates to COVID is either if someone they know died, or if someone they know or themselves has Long COVID. And that is clearly like we are missing something in political education, we are missing some kind of intervention that reaches the vast majority of people, because it is scary how there is this information gap, and how small changes could really make a big difference. Like for example, people don't know they can catch COVID outside, they just think they cannot. They think it is impossible. And that is a huge failure in messaging. People don't understand why -- like they think masks don't work because they got COVID, when in reality, their mask was like just covering their mouth the whole time.

They don't know that COVID is airborne, so people think that if there's no one in the space that they're in, even if it was occupied five minutes prior, that they're safe. And these are just huge messaging failures, because I think if people really truly understood how easy it is to get COVID, and how likely it is that something bad will happen to you if you get it, we would have a different set of behaviors.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:15:17

Yeah. So I wonder, do you have any sort of specific advice to pass on to people, you know, maybe people who are dealing with folks who are not listening to them that they're organizing with, or maybe even just feeling frustration, because they're not feeling like they can do enough?

Reina Sultan 1:15:36

Yeah. I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I'm not like super hopeful and feeling like so positive and happy about all of this. Like, I can't say that that's -- like I'm going into each new day being like, yes, today is the day I will change people's minds about this. Like I don't feel like that. And at the same time, I think it just -- with so many things that are unpopular, you just have to keep going, because there is nothing else to do. So it's not like I think that there's some --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:16:18

That's good advice, though. That is really -- that's a really hard lesson to learn. It took me like four years to learn that. It's a huge lesson.

Reina Sultan 1:16:27

And I take things so personally, even when they have genuinely nothing to do with me. Like, I just get very bogged down by people ignoring the ills of society, like it makes me -- like it genuinely keeps me up at night, I cry about it. And I know that some people see that as weakness. But I urge people who are waking up feeling scared, stressed, upset about this collective abandonment, to not discount those feelings, especially in the face of people being like, you're living in fear. Yes, yes, in fact, I am. And you should too. It's scary actually. And I think that you shouldn't leave that behind, like those emotions that you're feeling. feel hard and bad, and they are. But I don't think that they're something we should leave behind, instead to like pick up some kind of weird pragmatism that makes people feel better. Because I think that if I didn't feel this so deeply, it wouldn't -- I wouldn't feel that drive to try at least to change one person's mind, or make one person grab their mask on their way out the door.

Like I just -- I think we sometimes just have to lean into the fact that it sucks. And it just does. And I'm not -- I'm not hopeful that it's like going to change quickly or that people are suddenly going to be on my side. But I can't not believe that it's possible, because then there's no reason to keep going, and I want to keep going. So I think back a lot, obviously, to Mariame Kaba, and "hope is a discipline," and I will literally be like crying, shaking, throwing up on my bathroom floor being like, there's no way, we're never going to change this. And then I'm like god, Mariame Kaba would be so mad at me right now [laughing]. But it's like, I just try really hard because everything else I'm fighting for is also as ridiculous and unrealistic. Like people in my every day are telling me like, we could never live in a world without prisons. But we could. And I believe that.

So why can't I believe and other people also believe that we could live in a world where every single public place has incredible ventilation and filtration? We could. So it's just like, I have to hold on to the like 3% belief that I have, that something will shift dramatically. And that is why I keep doing it. That's just the only way I can explain it, I guess, because 97% of the time, I'm like, wow, I'm really doing this hopeless effort here. And then, but I don't stop. So it has to be that 3% that is like, I do believe that people are good. Like I do think that we all have this drive to survive and to help others survive, and it's just about harnessing it in some way. Like I do think that the vast majority of people does not want to be doing mass death and disability, because otherwise what are we doing?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:19:58

Yeah. I think that's so well put, Reina, I mean, I -- actually these -- the kind of realizations that I had coming into abolition -- I mean, it's something that I talked about this in my interview with Ruthie Gilmore, like it took a very long time for me to sort of come to abolition, starting with my friends being incarcerated and it not feeling right or fair, and not really having language or understanding for those feelings, to, you know, developing that into a coherent political view of the world and agenda and series of desires and demands. And along the way, that process involved so many moments of realizing that there were things that I just -- that just had not occurred to me before, and moving from there forward, you know, and taking lessons for that.

And it's interesting, because I spoke to Ed Yong over the summer, like right -- the day after I had gotten out of the hospital, or like I had gotten out that morning, and I was talking to Ed Yong, and he was asking me, you know, we're a couple months out from the community level system, like it looks like no one's gonna go back. Like, you know, I even feel despondent, he said, like sort of like I don't know what to do, like what do we do, like how do you keep going? You're on your show demanding a mask mandate, and everyone else is saying that's impossible, like what makes you feel like you can make that demand? And I was basically like, I've got a little Mariame Kaba in the back of my head, who's like, you know, you have to just move forward, you have to keep pushing, and you have to like refuse these kind of limitations that often come from just things we haven't actually thought through all the way, often. And I sort of explained to him, you know, you kind of have to practice hope, you have to move forward, you have to make these decisions to kind of be like I'm gonna be the person that's gonna make the big demand and like, it's okay if I'm working for people after me and I never see this. Like that's fine. That's part of it. That's what I'm hoping for, you know?

He was like, that had never occurred to me, like I had never thought of that before. And that was like so interesting to me, right? Because this is someone who has been writing about pandemic inequity, reporting on it, talking to experts, and patients, and doctors, and people experiencing Long COVID for the first time, and regulators, and lawmakers, and teachers, and all sorts of people, and has been covering the pandemic in such depth and like it's not necessarily things like just keep going, like just keep pushing, like those are not like the kinds of ideas about how politics work that come kind of implicitly from the way that we're taught politics is in the United States, right? Like this idea of being able to want and desire things that seem ludicrous, or "crazy," like a world with no police, a world with no prisons - like those are big asks and desires that the average person feels would be unreasonable to even voice as an opinion, or a desire for a political outcome, let alone a legitimate demand.

But there's so much value in sort of pushing ourselves to that point and really thinking through some of the things that we haven't questioned, which is, I think, also evidenced in the -- sort of what ultimately shifted your thinking on COVID, which was sort of this position of like understanding risk shifting, and your understanding of it going deeper. I mean, I think this is really just why political education is so important, and why we cannot have like COVID education that is apolitical, you can't -- you can't like depoliticize COVID and fix this, right? Like actually, the way to fix COVID is by politicizing it.

Reina Sultan 1:24:02

And I think that something that a lot of people forget, myself included, is that we were not born radical. And we had to learn a lot of stuff to get the positions that we hold now. And I think that it's very easy to get so angry that people are not doing the things or believing the things that you do. And it gets me every day almost, almost every day I am overwhelmed with the desire to just like cuss somebody out and be like, why do you not care about killing people, because this is fucked up. And then I have to remember that like, I was a liberal. There was a time [laughing] when I was like, I love politics. Like that existed for me, and I was able to change my thinking, but it was not overnight, and most people had this type of change. Like I don't know very many people who were lucky enough to be raised by someone who was radicalized and could like lead them on that journey.

And obviously, our education is not towards radicalization, so you kind of have to find that on your own. And I think that that's something that we have to remember when we're doing this work, that like our next co-conspirator might be someone who did something we disagreed with two weeks ago. And maybe it's trying to get them to change their behavior in March. And like, I'm not saying we should forgive and forget everything that anybody's ever done. That's harmful. I think that part of radicalization is really contending with the times that you believed things that were harmful and worked towards those ends. And also, if we disqualified everyone from radicalism, who is not yet there, we would have no one. So I do think that it is important for us to -- and this is something I try to say a lot when I'm posting, like you can just start again, you are allowed to start masking again, even if you weren't. I think a lot of people when they like stopped taking precautions, then felt they could never go back because they made this decision, which maybe they're now ashamed of, but they're like returning to masking, or buying a HEPA filter, or like asking everybody to take tests before hanging out now feels like oh my god, I made a mistake and I'm admitting it.

And that's okay. It's actually fine to make a mistake and admit it. And also to not admit it. You can just do it, and not say anything about it. That's not my preference, I hope that when people go back to taking precautions, that they want to bring people along with them. But if that feels too hard, and all you can do is start up precautions yourself again, you can just do that. There's no rule that says, when you put the N95 back in the closet, you can't just take it back out again. And I think that that's been hard for some people to grasp, that it's like an admittance of failure, or of like believing the lie. But that happens, we're people. Like it's not -- we're not without faults, no one is. So I think that we have to let people back into the fold who have opened their eyes to the truth. Not without being like, hey, what you did was fucked up and you should not do that anymore, but I do think that it's not possible for us to make the changes we want to make without a bigger amount of supporters. And we have to let ourselves accept people who are imperfect. Not excusing the behavior. I'm not one of those people who's like, we should be nicer to the like minimizers. That's not what I'm saying. I don't believe in that. I will not mince words with people.

There is a difference to me between someone who is getting on the internet and being like disabled people are being so fucked up right now. Like that, to me is like okay, you're clearly like doing work, actual like intention based work, to minimize what is going on and to make disabled people feel like they are some kind of burden on society, and the only good thing that we can all do is sit in our house and suffer. But I do think that if someone is actually contrite and feels like, yeah, I did go to those parties and do all that stuff, and then I was like, oh my god, what am I doing, and I learned about this, and I decided to change my mind -- that person is not the enemy any longer. And I think that we should -- we would do well to remember the times when we held fucked up opinions too.

Artie Vierkant 1:29:33

Alright, I think I'm going to speak first on this so that people know that we're now after the interviews, because obviously I wasn't on them.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:29:42

Probably a good idea.

Artie Vierkant 1:29:43

So yeah, we're just jumping back in to send things off for this week. As promised, part two of this series of interviews will be out in the public feed next week, so next Thursday. Look forward to that. I'm very excited for everyone to hear the interviews for part two.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:30:02

Yep, we're gonna leave it there for today. Thank you to Alex and Reina. See y'all for part two next week. And patrons, we'll see you in the bonus feed on Monday.

To support the show and get access to all of our weekly bonus episodes, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism or request it at your local library, and follow us at @deathpanel_.

And as always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

Death Panel 1:31:02

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)