Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s daughter Violet Affleck, 19, is a freshman at Yale University. We’ve seen Violet grow up as part of her famous family, and she’s been wearing a mask for years. It turns out that Violet developed a post viral syndrome in 2019 which informed her choice to protect her health. She opened up about this during a speech in front of the LA County Board of Supervisors last July advocating for mask availability and indoor air mitigation. Violet has a sweeping new essay published in the Yale Global Health Review. She opens with her experiences during the Palisades fire, during which her family fled to a hotel. (Their home was spared.) While she was talking to other fire victims, she was surprised that no one saw the connection to climate change. She goes on to discuss how public health crises and climate disasters disproportionately affect minority and disabled populations. It’s a powerful essay reminding us that small changes matter and can make a difference. They can also pile up to the point that we reach an irreversible tipping point. Here’s some of her essay, with much more at the source:

I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room. She was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings. I was surprised at her surprise: as a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of generation Z, my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when. As I chatted with adults in the hotel where we’d gone to escape the smoke, though, I found my position to be an uncommon one: people spoke of how long rebuilding would take, how much it would cost, and how tragically odd the whole situation had been. The crisis was acute, a burst of bad luck. It had come from a combination of high winds and low rains – what, my little brother asked, did global warming have to do with the speed of the wind? Outside, people wandered, faces covered by N95s. “This feels like COVID,” said one wild-eyed woman clutching two leashed Yorkies. “We’re all in masks.”

I offered her a handful of extras – masks, not dogs – feeling that, in a way, she was right: the structural dimension of the climate crisis, “like COVID,” will soon become impossible for even society’s most insulated to ignore…

The FEMA assistance quickly rushed to homeowners in the Palisades – many of whom are significant political donors – has flowed much more slowly to Asheville, North Carolina, where thousands were stranded in disastrous floods in 2024. The stringent COVID-19 precautions observed earlier in the pandemic melted away as it became known that Black and disabled people were most vulnerable to serious illness and death, and as Long COVID entered the canon of chronic illnesses ascribed to “hysteria” or “malingering” among their mostly-female sufferers…

Mutual aid is far from a recent invention… But the whiplash between an institutional embrace of social welfare policies “during COVID” and the eugenicist logic required to disavow those policies five years later show us both what is present and what is possible for the climate justice movement: we can demand high-level societal realignment in the name of our common welfare, even as we collectively source the knowledge and resources needed to protect our communities in the meantime. We can “follow the science” even when it scares us, instead of insisting that “we have to live our lives” until those lives go up in flames.

[From Yale Global Health Review]

Violet is so wicked smart! It’s so like Gen Z to be surprised when Gen X doesn’t see the bigger picture immediately. We need to process some things, kids! We’re also the ones taking care of the nitty gritty details so they don’t have to worry about them. I could relate to so much of what Violet wrote here, particularly about seeing people’s reaction to a disaster (in my case Covid) and questioning their myopic viewpoint. It still blows my mind that I’m usually the only person in a crowded indoor space wearing a mask. Once you know the facts about long covid it’s crazy to realize that people either don’t know about it or don’t care. It’s heartening that a young woman who is so privileged and famous cares deeply about these issues and is using her platform. We need more famous people to be bold and to speak truth to power, especially when the evil yokels in charge are working to dismantle the meager protections we have against mass infection and death.

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