GREAT DIE-OFF: Snowflake, Vaccinated West Coast Millennial
Excerpt from "COVIDsteria: An Oral History of America's Great Reset" - see https://covidsteria.substack.com/p/covidsteria-table-of-contents
Snowflake is like many vaccinated and thoroughly traumatized Millennial survivors of the Great Die-Off and the COVIDsteria years. She left the depopulated West Coast city she had moved to for university to move home to the safety of her parents' basement. She never leaves this basement which is probably a good thing given her immune system and overall health.
I interviewed Snowflake via video conferencing software to get the millennial perspective of the COVIDsteria pandemic, vaccination, and the Great Die-Off. However, we were interrupted a couple of times as her wi-fi kept dropping our call...
Let me start by stating my preferred pronouns are she, her, and hers. My precious Chad’s preferred pronouns were always they, them, and theirs because those words were gender-neutral, and he was always an ally to the feminist and LGBTQ communities. 1
Hmmm... ok. I got that. How did the COVIDsteria pandemic impact your life as a millennial living in a West Coast city?
As if life for a millennial in a systemically racist, sexist, and homophobic country ruled by a racist Fascist totalitarian dictator could not get any worst… [She sighs.]
Millions of Americans were dying every month from a disease that was an airborne Ebola and a Black Death with some Spanish flu mixed in that required a great reset to contain. Since there were no treatments until you needed a hospital ventilator, my precious Chad and I, along with all of our friends, were terrified. Many of our friends still living at home with their parents locked themselves up in their basements and refused to come out at all.
My precious Chad and I were not as fortunate as we had moved to the West Coast to study. We did not live with our parents and would somehow have to survive the worst pandemic ever all on our own. We had to go out on our own to wait in long lines to stockpile as much toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and masks as we could get our hands-on.
But going out of our apartment was so terrifying and such a huge hassle. To protect ourselves from the deadly COVIDsteria virus, we had to put on masks, face shields, and disposable gloves to go out and then thoroughly decontaminate ourselves, our clothes, and anything we purchased once we got home. Since this process could take hours, we almost stopped... [The video call drops. I spend a few minutes trying to reconnect...]
I am sorry! The wi-fi and internet have been so unreliable since before that horrible Great Die-Off! [She shakes her head and frowns.]
As I was saying, we almost stopped going out altogether and tried to order everything online as much as possible.
Our real problem during the pandemic, though, was our ability to obtain proper and healthy nourishment. My precious Chad was a full vegan, while I am just a vegetarian who still eats seafood, dairy, and sometimes poultry depending on how they were caught, raised, or prepared. We only ate non-GMO certified organic and farm-fresh fruits and vegetables to avoid putting the dangerous pesticides or chemicals used by big corporate farms into our bodies.
When we had to buy something processed, like our soy milk or wheat germ, we read all the labels carefully. We would then search online for any information about any product ingredient that sounded like it was not natural, certified organic, or might be a GMO. We then checked the packaging to avoid plastics made from fossil fuels as we did not want to contribute to climate change or harm endangered sea turtles. Finally, we had to make sure the product manufacturers supported the right causes and politicians.
Even after doing this careful research, we still could not fully trust food and beverage corporations or big restaurant chains. We would go so far as to skip eating a meal altogether to keep our bodies safe from being harmed by big greedy corporations. 2 [She coughs and starts breathing heavily.]
As you can imagine, my precious Chad and I were both relieved when Team Science defeated the racist Fascist dictator. We finally had hope that we might somehow survive the pandemic…
What did you think of the new Administration’s COVIDsteria anal swabbing mandate?
Let me state that I was not homophobic, and I have always had many gay male friends. But I was also born into a society with deep systemic homophobia. My subconscious homophobic white American mind told me that anal swabbing for COVIDsteria was unnecessarily invasive - making me swabbing hesitant. I also suffered from irrational subconscious homophobic fears that swabbing would make me walk like a penguin afterward.
Fortunately, I had my precious Chad to help me overcome my swabbing hesitancy and put to rest any systematic homophobic fears buried deep within my white American subconscious mind. Like nearly all of the non-gay students one met in Graduate School, my precious Chad was bisexual. He had plenty of experience with men of all races when it came to being hmmm… [She pauses to cough.] Well, he was more of an expert about this sort of swabbing than I was.