Someone Infected Neil Gaiman with COVID-19, After Venues Refused to Enforce Audience Masking
With a call-to-action and concrete solutions for safer venues.
With a call-to-action and concrete solutions for safer venues.With a call-to-action and concrete solutions for safer venues.
First thing's first. If the phrasing in the title feels unfamiliar, it has a purpose: We are eliminating the passive voice from the pandemic. Right now.
Neil Gaiman didn’t just get COVID-19.
Someone INFECTED Neil Gaiman with COVID-19.
And many someones in overlapping layers of responsibility ENABLED this infection.
This linguistic shift from the passive to active voice might seem irrelevant but, instead of just echoing the framing we see in the headlines — that Neil Gaiman got COVID-19— it’s time to own that somebody has infected Neil.
The passive voice has served a macabre purpose in this pandemic. The passive voice, by erasing the subject of the sentence, neatly obscures accountability, and with it our own role in unmitigated infections. Moreover, it has prevented us from identifying the layers of responsibility in enabling infections on a mass scale. Thi…