On being sick of being sick

After several years of being virus-free, I’ve been sick several times in the last eight months. I was telling a friend that I was sick of being sick and he told me that’s how your body gets stronger; it builds up immunity by being sick. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps we are incapable of mastering these unseen enemies. But I can’t help feeling that this is a capitulatory attitude, the attitude of someone stuck in the Dark Ages, a time when people had no hope of beating disease. We used to be able to do better. We used to think that we could conquer disease.

He even went so far as to say that when I felt better again, I would feel a lot better. Well, yes, but that’s how the mind works, isn’t it? I will have lost my reference point of how good I used to feel before I got sick. I will be comparing my no longer being sick to having been sick and finding it better. That is not science. That is hoodoo. “I been down so long, everything looks like up to me” would better describe that attitude.

Getting sick to make yourself stronger sounds to me very much like the same level of intellectual rigor that homeopathy brings to the table. It sounds like what those people who base-jump off of buildings say.

Once I’m feeling better, he’ll certainly ask how I feel. I will tell him that I feel like a butterfly that has slipped its cocoon. And that’s probably how it will feel, but I will wonder whether the new butterfly is the same as that which came before the illness. The chrysalis is ugly. Better? Worse? I can look at my sports and health data. I can compare, watch as I approach a new cycling season. I’ll know that I have another year in my body as well, skewing any comparison.

The basic attitude of “getting sick is part of life”, though, is a complete capitulation to convenience and an unconscious deferring to the interests of capital. How so? The lesson it inculcates is: How could anyone simply stop doing what they’re doing in order to be ill and to protect others from getting ill when that person has work to do? Why should that person stop working when there’s no way to prevent the spread of disease anyway?

On top of that, we’ve also learned more recently that vaccines don’t work, so forget about them as well. We have regressed from where we were decades ago. Other, more primitive societies take medicines happily, knowing that they help. Our society views everything with suspicion because it’s been tainted with the needs of capital. We used to have inexpensive vaccines and medicines, but no more. Now, all medicines and vaccines can only be produced by multinational, global conglomerates that extract as much rent as they possibly can.

Knowing that we can’t fix this and balking at this manipulation, we pretend that vaccines don’t work instead. Either you believe in science and pay what the masters demand—which is everything—or you disbelieve and end up dying sooner. Either way, capitalism wins, gliding effortlessly along, maw open, inhaling everything.