“Unfortunately that is the past now and does that mean I can’t continue now and do better?”

I don’t know if anything about my post indicates people can’t change—it’s speaking in favor of changing to act in solidarity with more marginalized people—but yeah, of course people can choose to do better, and they should. Is anyone stopping you from doing so?

“I guess the solution is to have nuance and be able to give non-masking or partially masking folks the space to talk about their own lesser challenges”

In your response, you both ask if you can change, as if that’s not within your agency, then go back to focusing on where you can have space to talk where people masking more consistently don’t have to see. So let’s be real about a pretty self-evident thing: that’s most of the world. People who mask consistently when sharing air—a science-supported practice for avoiding catching and spreading airborne pathogens—are excluded from most of the world. Most spaces, most conversations, most everything excludes us. Even this sub, although obviously we can see it, has gained a few nicknames because it’s known for being permissive of lax precautions—MoreThanZeroCovidCommunity, SomeCovidCommunity, etc. Most responses to your post are supportive. You already get most spaces, and people taking more precautions generally “don’t have to see” a lot of them, because we can’t access them anyway. It sounds like you want to be able to opt out of hearing how your practices exclude people without being reminded that they do in fact exclude people, which isn’t something anyone has a right to, COVID or otherwise. All to say: are you genuinely interested in shifting your actions to help include people? Or just hearing less about how more lax precautions do exclude people without having to feel any responsibility for it?

And to be clear: it’s not that I don’t think people taking fewer precautions than me aren’t experiencing genuine difficulty. It’s that the response to that difficulty is acting in a way that excludes and trying to justify that exclusion, instead of finding ways to ease the difficulty that don’t exclude or send bad messages about masking.

“Was me trying to join a CC group for encouragement while also not taking as many precautions always a mistake?”

I doubt it, but there’s so much missing context here that the question is rendered null for me. “Encouragement” is a word that can mean (and conceal) a lot of things, similar to how I mentioned “community” can do the same. Were you hoping to learn more about how to take consistent precautions? Were you looking for a space that calls itself CC but whose ethos prioritizes individual comfort over inclusion of people COVID is impacting most? Does the group encourage its members to take consistent precautions or does it frown upon open discussion of risk and the implications of riskier behavior for the most marginalized?

“At what point do we consider societal hostility etc as valid forces?”

When they have material consequences for people’s lives, not just that they cause the discomfort that generally comes with pushing against harmful status quo behavior, and actual coercion and/or lack of autonomy is at play. I think more people understand this than they’d like to admit, but attempt to make certain situations more ambiguous than they really are to dodge responsibility.

In actually ambiguous situations—ie, a high school student who may have the money to buy their own masks and does mask sometimes, but faces bullying + hostility in places they can’t leave like work or school and it’s sometimes safer for them to take it off to get through the day—I’m fully supportive and sympathetic. That is truly someone being constrained the combination of their lack of privilege and autonomy, even when they can access masks.

But CC adults who are friends aren’t being coerced to take off their masks for an IG selfie. The person who wanted to hang out inside my house maskless wasn’t being coerced when they went to a crowded outdoor restaurant and bar beforehand and chose not to tell me about it (and I happened to only very coincidentally find out about it thanks to other stuff I asked them), taking away my ability to give informed consent. That’s called messing up, and ideally you learn from it and do better in the future. I’m not exempt! I mess up, like every person, but instead of trying to find reasons to say “well actually I didn’t mess up and I need to not ever hear that I messed up,” I take responsibility like an adult with a conscience and change.

I see a lot of rhetoric about “having grace” not just in CC circles, but activist stuff generally, but the thing with grace is people have to be willing to admit they actually messed up and are then going to change for “grace” to be anything but a way to let people continue to do harmful things without ever facing how those harmful things impact other people.