From bad to worse
Let’s stop propagating the mirage of yesterday’s (pre-COVID world) prosperity as real.
As this pandemic unrolls more tragedies by the day, we hear cries of going back to the ‘normal’, back again to the hustling cities and metropolis, back to ‘thriving’ economies, back to our ‘work’ routine, back to ‘schools’, back to ‘sports’, back to ‘better’.
But let’s just pause for a bit to decipher the light from dark, to discriminate pitch black from shades of grey, and hold a torch to darkness and not look for shade instead. Whilst we talk of ‘herd immunity’, let’s also spare a thought for ‘herd development’; development not as growth, centrality, individuality through extraction and consumption but development (as Sen calls it) as freedom, as opportunity, as equality, through regeneration, redistribution and circularity.
Social distancing is not anew, it’s eerily familiar though not overtly. Remember the humans we had sifted from our surroundings, who dwelled in slums — those slums have come to haunt us now. May they keep haunting us, for we brought it to ourselves. The naked segregation of our society has crumbled, may it never hoist again. May the cramped, ‘dirty’ slums that have pulled our attention at this time don’t exist when we go ‘back’.
The blatant, cruel, ruthless inequality that had captured all spheres of our life has come to haunt us. May it keep haunting us, for we never cared before. While we adorned ourselves and the spaces around us with their labour, they were handed just enough to survive. Survive just for another day of labour, withstand another day of humiliation.
When we hear voices yearning to go back to normal, let’s question if what we were living was normal. It was not normal for the millions that were barely surviving, for our planet whose lungs were choked, for the bleached corals, for the endangered rhinos. It was normal for us perhaps, or we were made to believe that is was, was it? The systematic individuation our education system attempts to achieve while compromising empathy and compassion is not normal. The twin presence of an abundance of food and hunger, wealth and poverty, is not normal. The work that we identify ourselves with, where we take a break to do better work, study to work better, where our whole has become the work we do for a corporate or to serve capital is not normal. The obsession with consumerism, getting our hands on the next product that will fix our lives is not normal.
Let’s not mourn the passing of worse, let’s prepare for better.
