I feel like the last day or two things have finally hit me how serious this is and how little the UK government cares. It took no time for the virus to reveal the invisibilised inequalities of our country. The flow of capital always takes precedence over the actual lives of the sick, disabled, elderly and poor but an emergency like this makes this fact so unbearably present. I fear the UK has become so numb to death by systemic neglect. I hate that this level of disaster will be what puts that into perspective. Even as we endlessly plumb the depths of fucking despair and tragedy we still carry on stuck inside our capitalist realism paradigm. Exponential suffering unless we curb it now (preferably yesterday).
Anne Boyer’s words are clearer and give me that bitterest-sweet glimmer of hope and trust in our human capacity for solidarity in the middle of ongoing fucking catastrophe.
The way social distancing works requires faith: we must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love. We face such a strange task, here, to come together in spirit and keep a distance in body at the same time. We can do it. I am writing this because I want the good in us to break through the layers of hateful nonsense we’ve been drowning in. I think we can be good, but we also must prepare for an amplification of evil’s evil. The time when the invisible becomes visible is at hand.
Yesterday I went to the launch of Matt Colquhoun’s new book ‘Egress: on Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher’. Unfortunately I was way too tired to bring my full brain to the conversation and haven’t had a chance to read the book yet but I left with some thoughts that seem well timed as a last IRL big group thing before figuring out what the hell to do next. My sleepy memory interpreted it as something about putting intentionality into the words friendship and community, overcoming the barriers put between us by the strain of life under this system – “touching from a distance”.
I feel like a virus can really bring out a hunker-down mentality that’s so easy to fall into when we’ve been groomed into such suffocating individualism as alienated subjects under capitalism. We live on an island with a political impulse to self-isolate, to compare other human beings from outside the white body politic as contagions and threats. That’s why I think Anne Boyer’s words are so important to reframing this – distancing is going to be a form of community care now. Acting in the interest of people we will never meet and with no immediate or obvious benefit to ourselves is unfortunately not something we are encouraged to do. A virus doesn’t give a shit about border politics and fincancial flows and yet lives are being put in danger because state responses put these things first. Capitalism is an abstract force and likewise we can’t see a virus. Like whistleblowing doctors, leftists have to constantly fight against normalcy and complacancy rather than allow the dangers of these things to remain invisible and over-looked. The inherent distance put between us under capitalism will now manifest physically, become a measurable 2 metres, and we will have to reach across it more consciously and carefully than ever.
Navigating all of this is going to be a new challenge cause the situation is going to change rapidly. Maintaining bonds and actions of solidarity when we’re not able to be in the same space as one another is going to take extra thought and creativity. Social distancing contains the danger of reaffirming our alienation, loneliness and individualism but is also a necessity – an act of care in defiance of the ‘business as usual/keep calm carry on’ plan revealed by Boris and his government who would gladly wash its hands of the citizens it deems least productive.
Another bit from Boyer:
“fear educates our care for each other — we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a poor person’s life might be made even more miserable, and we do whatever we can to protect them because we fear a version of human life in which everyone lives only for themselves. I am not the least bit afraid of this kind of fear, for fear is a vital and necessary part of love.”
