People continue to call COVID advocates’ pleas for masking “unreasonable”.

Instead of calling our desperate requests for help mitigating the virus unreasonable, you could call the situation unreasonable.

You could call this situation our government has put us in unreasonable. After 6 years, why are disabled people still in such direct and constant peril?

Why is COVID such an ongoing threat, such a pertinent problem?

You could direct your frustration over said unreasonable, untenable situation upward, where it belongs: at the government, not downward, at struggling sick people, who have no choice but to engage with COVID safety practices including masking.

We are not being unreasonable to expect freedom from infection with a pathogen that will certainly further disable us when we step into a public space.

We are not being unreasonable when we expect solidarity from nominally progressive people.

We are not being unreasonable when we demand an end to this charade that COVID is “normal” now and we’re all going to have to accept endless infections- so if that means disability, loss of career, loss of home, loss of life for you, you’re a write-off. That is not a progressive argument.

Let’s talk about the “reasonable” things being asked of Long COVID patients in our current reality.

According to the masses:

It is not reasonable to ask “regular” people to wear masks ever, but it is reasonable that anyone and everyone who cannot afford another COVID infection must wear masks always, everywhere forever, knowing one slip-up could mean permanent loss of function, loss of career, loss of house and home, loss of life.

It is not reasonable to ask for any COVID safety from the less vulnerable, but it is reasonable to ask for maximum COVID safety from the most vulnerable- and all the attendant hassle, time, energy and money that involves. (This, rather than demand an institutional, long-term mitigation and elimination plan from the government).

It is not reasonable to place any expectations on the broad back of the majority of society, but it is reasonable to pile everything the majority won’t do on the thin slice of disabled people who are carrying their own weight and attempting to carry everyone else’s as they drown.

Do abled people understand, when they say it’s “unrealistic” to expect people to mask everywhere, that they are describing the only guidance disabled people have received re: how to get through another day alive? Like, very literally the guidance from the CDC as to how to survive the ongoing pandemic - by constantly masking, by testing every person around us, by avoiding the COVID that those around us are doing absolutely nothing to stop spreading?

Sounds simple, until you consider trying to adopt some of those measures yourself, does it?