No One is Saving Us: Why I No Longer Care for COVID Protocols

I’m holding back tears, for the 2nd time in 2 months because another family member was taken by COVID. This is the 12th or 20th time this has happened in the past year, I’m not sure because I stopped counting. The truth is, it feels like nobody is counting lives lost, they only count bodies, detached from the stories that they carried and the hearts that they broke when they passed. If they were counting lives, they would do more than prevent the spread, they would activate, change and revolutionize systems and structures that keep us sick.

My husband and I were both born and raised in towns that lacked some of the basic resources needed to build healthy habits. Our desire for change has driven our careers and with it, opportunities to work alongside other disenfranchised communities. It has given us a global perspective by those not prioritized by healthcare and government policies. So when this pandemic hit, our personal and professional background gave us a front row seat at watching COVID ravage poor and marginalized communities, ours included. Communities so tight knit that a death of a neighbor is a death of a family. His community, a First Nation in California, was harder hit than mine, but after years of living on “the rez” the deaths feel as if they were my own.

Week by week and year by year, the government and well intended privileged folks have put rules and regulations to prolong the inevitable. Masks, isolation, vaccines and endless confusing protocols were created in the name of protecting community members with comorbidity, or, as others label us, “they were going to die anyway”. But many are starting to see that these protocols are just prolonging the fact that we are all going to get it and many (most for some) will inevitably die. It’s beginning to feel like we are only spacing out our deaths so we don’t collapse COVID ICU units, yet we continue to ignore how we are collapsing entire demographics. In alignment with these protocols, we are alienating the voices of scientists and doctors who question the very processes that are ensuring our demise and delaying the growth of our children.

So, if you are wondering, this might be why communities with high death rates are no longer masking up or staying home. The truth is, for decades, poor disenfranchised communities have survived by building human connection and sheer grit not from hiding, hoping and government sponsored policies. We are starting to realize, for America and most other countries, when it comes to COVID, there is no money in addressing the fundamental issues that are killing us, so instead, a series of pharma-funded protocols have been put in place to space our death throughout the years.

The truth is, if they were really counting the lives lost in our communities, they would be addressing the health issues that made us high risk vs creating quarantines that skyrocketed death by suicide and Fentanyl poisoning (currently the leading cause of death for anyone age 18–45). They would be addressing food desserts and broken homes or the fact that diabetes in Native Americans began when land and water was stolen and replaced with food commodities and residential schools. We are being divided over vaccines instead of being united over universal healthcare, and that is not an accident. The minute the conversation stopped being about healing and more about sanctions, politics and control is when many people, who have been subject to the latter, stopped listening.

As an immigrant and a mother of Native children, I know the survival of our our story and our communities does not come from masking up and sitting down. It comes from waking up and self-education. So no, I’m not listening. I’m tiered. I’m tiered of trying to abide by laws and protocols that only support people with digital jobs and safe spaces. I’m tiered of seeing death rates go up by 30% and a fraction of it is from COVID but most of it is coming from our towns. But most of all, I’m tiered of being told, by people who haven’t lost anyone from COVID, that my exhaustion is coming from denial or a political affiliation. Because it’s not. It’s coming from the many lives I am going to miss because the government and society didn’t give a fuck about them when they were alive.