We Calculate How Much Death We Accept

It starts with a shrug.

A cough dismissed. A mask pocketed. A headline scrolled past. The quiet normalization of risk. The idea that “everyone will get it eventually.” That some people just won’t make it, and that’s fine. That’s the price of moving on.

But that’s how political violence begins — not with spectacle, but with consent. With the slow erosion of empathy, the bureaucratization of suffering, the dulling of outrage until neglect becomes policy. The body count turns into a chart. The chart turns into a talking point. And the talking point turns into a story about “resilience.”

COVID was never apolitical. The virus spread through the same fault lines that have always divided us: class, race, disability, access. The same groups once marked as disposable are dying again, unseen, while those in power rebrand mass infection as “freedom.”

We’ve been here before. The last great pandemic ended not with justice, but with denial. The world danced through the 1920s, desperate to forget the graves. And in that forgetting, a new order took root—one that called vulnerability weakness, that turned public health into hierarchy, that promised purity through exclusion. Out of the flu’s shadow came the eugenic dream: a nation purged of the frail, the foreign, the unfit.

That dream didn’t vanish. It evolved.

Now it wears the language of economics. “Reopening.” “Personal responsibility.” “Acceptable risk.” The old ideology of strength remade for the algorithmic age. The same logic that built camps and sterilization programs now fuels headlines about “living with the virus.”

This is political violence — diffuse, polite, and plausible. It kills not with bullets but with policies, with indifference, with the normalization of harm. It asks for your silence, not your loyalty. It needs you tired, not convinced.

And the machine keeps turning.

The same machine that turned a random shooter into a symbol. That rewrote grief into propaganda. That told us the enemy is always someone else. It turns again now, grinding compassion into dust, whispering that care is weakness and that endurance is virtue.

Every time we unmask in a crowded room, we rehearse that obedience. Every time we look away from the disabled and the dying, we agree to the terms. Every time we call abandonment freedom, the clock strikes thirteen.

Update 10/13/2025:

If this still feels distant—if the grief has dulled into noise and the danger into background radiation—look again. A new medical review just confirmed what so many disabled and chronically ill people have been screaming into the void: COVID doesn’t just come and go. It lingers. It burrows into organs. It damages blood vessels. It rewires the immune system. It accelerates aging. It leaves behind exhaustion, inflammation, confusion, collapse.

It doesn’t have to kill you to leave you changed.

They’re calling it “Airborne AIDS”—not because it’s the same virus, but because it, too, creates an acquired vulnerability. An immune system worn thin. A body that stops bouncing back. But unlike HIV, it spreads through the air. Quietly. Relentlessly. At your job. In your classroom. In your hospital bed.

And yet we’re told to laugh it off. To stop masking. To trust that infection is fine now—normal now. But normal is a story written by power. And that story depends on you forgetting what this virus still does.

The science is moving. The virus is moving. Pretending it’s 2019 again won’t save us. But refusing to look away might.

We have accepted between **1,200 to 2,100 deaths every week** in the United States alone. That’s the number the machine has calculated as “socially acceptable.” Not because the virus is weaker. Not because the threat is gone. But because that’s the level at which outrage no longer disrupts the feed. That’s the number at which funerals blend into the background. That’s the metric for so-called stability.

It is no accident. It is design. This is how the state learns — how corporations learn — how propaganda learns what we’ll tolerate. And the answer, apparently, is *this*. This many dead. This many sick. This many disabled. As long as it’s not on camera. As long as it’s not someone with a name big enough to trend.

And I get it. I really do. I understand what it means to stare at the facts and feel the shame rise in your throat. To realize that maybe you’ve contributed. That maybe you passed it along. That maybe you thought it was over when it wasn’t. That maybe you stopped looking because looking meant remembering, and remembering hurt.

But that reckoning — that *grappling* — is necessary. It is the only thing that makes us human in the face of systems designed to grind that humanity out of us. The machine depends on your denial. Your guilt is not proof of your failure — it is proof that you still care.

There is no shame in being exhausted. But there is danger in mistaking that exhaustion for freedom. There is no shame in being overwhelmed. But there is a line between overwhelm and complicity, and the longer we sit in silence, the more the line disappears.

History doesn’t repeat by accident; it repeats by design. When a society decides that some lives are less worthy of protection, it’s already building the scaffolding of fascism. The only difference now is that the purges happen in plain sight — through air, through policy, through the myth of inevitability.

Masking isn’t fear. It’s defiance.

Vaccination isn’t submission. It’s solidarity.

Care isn’t fragility. It’s resistance.

Because if you want to know how fascism takes root, look at who’s allowed to breathe.

Don’t mistake exhaustion for freedom. Don’t mistake convenience for consent. Don’t mistake the absence of bombs for peace.

The air has always been political.

And the machine is still hungry.

This post is part of an ongoing series tracing the collapse of empathy, the erosion of truth, and the machinery of silence we’re all asked to serve. For the full arc—and why it matters now more than ever—start here with the full series overview.