Definitely the best way of reading this is to pretend that, in five years time, I emailed you and told you that I found this, written in an exercise book by a neighbour at the worst moment of the COVID-19 crisis. Definitely.
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It isn’t supposed to be like this.
By now we were supposed to be riding in flying cars over rolling grass hills. With cancer cured, we were going to have have plenty of time to enjoy instant, universal access to all human knowledge and culture. Maybe there would be replicators to provide us with whatever delicious food we needed, but there would definitely be love for all — irrespective of colour, creed, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or provenance.
Instead we’re stuck somewhere in between the gradual downward grind of life as normal and the post-apocalyptic world of “28 Days Later.” Walking forward under the slow, massive, baleful shadow of Climate Change we have come suddenly face-to-face with the slavering hounds of a global pandemic.
Die now or die later. Burn the world before our grandchildren arrive or sacrifice ourselves to disease. Or just shelter in place until further notice. These are not human choices. Recently when I’m home with my family, I feel like we should never leave. Thankfully, when I go out, it seems like life is proceeding as normal. But, even so by email, the lights are going out one by one. Sports stop, schools send home pupils, Italy closes.
After 9/11 every plane suddenly seemed like a potential flying bomb. Now, as the terrifying rollercoaster of COVID-19 racks us to the top of the pandemic ride, every person on the street looks like a walking infection. And, like, 9/11, the weather is beautiful, to add to our cognitive dissonance.
And our leaders have refused to make responsible choices on the way to this.
“Don’t travel on crowded subways,” said the New York governor and the New York mayor in a rare moment of agreement. But it’s a suggestion that makes no sense. The subways are always crowded. Either we live together as a city or we don’t live. Either we go to school and work or we don’t. What are we supposed to do with “avoid crowded subways”?
But I’m not really blaming those two politicians. The damage is being done elsewhere. COVID-19 is a disease born of poverty, incubated by authoritarianism and spread by consumer capitalism. The fight against it — the battle against time, to slow the spread, find a vaccine (or even, gasp, cure) — has been ignored by truth-averse regimes of all stripes, whether Communist, Republican or Silicon Valley.
The contagion was denied by the despots in China until they lost control of it. Iran is still in disarray. I can’t speak for Europe which may just be ahead of the US in testing rather than infections, but the self-interest of politicians and deliberate misinformation of propagandists and unscrupulous groups on Facebook have sped the spread of this coronavirus in the United States.
Though the details are not yet knowable, the way out is pretty clear: Clarity of intent, stringency of action, transparency of information, stridency of dissemination and deep funding of public science and medicine. It’s all about forming a flexible set of strategies to slow the spread and the severity of the disease until, with luck, it becomes marginalized as a geographical and seasonal danger to a small group.
But that’s not happening. Instead the fatal fact of COVID-19 is making us feel schizophrenic because it forces us to live across the mutually exclusive realities of opinion media and social media. On the one hand bizarre bubbles of “media” scorn coronavirus as a downer and a threat to the Dow Jones, on the other hand truth-based media regularly but boringly attacks those who govern with no respect for the reality principle. The fact of a potential pandemic doesn’t allow us — post-Katrina, post-Puerto Rico, post-AIDS, post-911 — the luxury of ignoring either.
So we live on, left-brained, right-brained. Watching the lights blink off. Maybe it’s not the end of the world, but maybe we were warned with AIDS, SARS, H1NI, MERS, (Rio, Kyoto, Paris) — so maybe it actually just is.
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In other news, I moved after 18 years. We now have more than one bathroom, but it has been traumatic. More on that later.
In other, other news, I am writing about every music chart from the 1980s week by week, 40 years on. Check it out on Facebook. (it’s true)