The future has been cancelled
Whether we like it or not, some of the pleasures we took from life before the pandemic are gone, probably forever
Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.
From La Peste (The Plague) by Albert Camus (1947)
WHEN this nightmare first began in the middle of March, I made a promise to myself that for my own sanity I would go for a bike ride before the start of each work day, and again after I knocked off at night. Routine, I reasoned, was essential to a healthy body and a healthy mind.
I’ve kept that promise more or less through the past four months — a full one third of the year — only missing the occasional morning or evening of weaving my way through Brunswick backstreets until I arrive at the point where Royal Parade meets Park Street, and then pedalling a lap around Princes Park, past the old Carlton football ground, the empty ovals, the sealed off playground equipment, the silent cemetery, and finally the solid terrace houses on the east side of Parkville.
The very first work morning after the lockdown began properly and we were ordered to work from home was a beautifully bright early-autumn day. Leaves were yet to begin falling from the trees and the park shimmered in the morning light as shafts of sun beamed through the foliage. I was far from alone that morning as hundreds of others also took advantage of the weather to enjoy the park to exercise, socialise, walk the dog and breath fresh air.
‘A great day to be alive,’ or some such crap I posted on Facebook after snapping a couple of photos on my phone.
For those of us privileged enough to have jobs that could be done from home, it was almost possible to think of the first lockdown as a short holiday, a brief respite from the daily grind of dressing up for work and the commute to and from the workplace. An opportunity to reconnect with other members of the household and establish a better work-life balance.
That was four months ago, when we believed this would be a temporary disruption before we could get back to our lives as they had been. And by May, we seemed to be on track to the return of normality — so much so that I had begun planning a mid-July road trip with two mates up the east coast, just the three of us in one car with a boat on a trailer behind us; a week of fishing, talking, drinking, but most importantly an escape from Melbourne.
But now, in week three of lockdown 2.0, it feels as if the future has been cancelled.
This lockdown feels different, heavier, more of a burden, like penitence for having been too successful the first time around. That it came just as the rules were starting to be relaxed, cafes, pubs and restaurants were starting to re-open, makes it seem extra cruel.
I have friends and colleagues and family members I now haven’t seen for three months, a drawer full of tickets to gigs that have already been postponed to the end of the year, but may never be performed. Cancelled holidays, renovation plans on hold, and a nagging sense of anxiety about what could come next.
Under lockdown 2.0, minor ailments, small aches and pains, seem to be accentuated perhaps because there is nothing else to occupy the mind. Muscles become dissipated by under-use and poor posture. And of course it’s winter, both a blessing and a curse in its unrelenting bleakness.
It’s a sobering thought that statistically one in every 10 adults you pass is probably now out of work, although you suspect the jobless are not leaving their homes much at all. Why would you? What is the point?
The trees on my daily bike ride are now leafless and the sky is a blanket of grey. Groups of people dressed from foot to toe in black, apart from their fluorescent yellow vests, loom out of the morning fog like destitute ghosts. Carrying bottles of disinfectant and cloths they aimlessly wander around the park, listlessly wiping down pedestrian crossing buttons, lamp poles, fence posts. I’m told they are all on short-term visas and have been employed under some government scheme to keep them gainfully occupied so they can survive and remain in Australia until it’s all over. I don’t know whether it’s true: it all seems futile and they realise it.
In recent days, the mobs of sanitisers have been joined by clusters of soldiers and police whose job, I guess, is to patrol the park and enforce the new rule of mandatory face coverings at all times when outside.
Very few people wore masks during the first lockdown, but on my first morning ride after the directive came into operation last week, I could count on one hand the number of people I saw without one. I was one of them, although I rode with a neck warmer that could easily be pulled over my mouth and nose if needed. Bike riding and jogging are the only two outdoor activities now exempt from wearing face coverings.
I see people driving past with the windows wound up and a mask covering their face, and I wonder why? What are they afraid of in their hermetically sealed car?
Just six months ago — well, perhaps a little longer because masks began to become de rigeur when the bushfire smoke hung over the cities in December and January — face coverings were a rare thing in Australia, usually only seen in areas that had a high population density of young Asian students who were accustomed to wearing them to avoid disease or pollution back home.
But no longer. At the moment, it is difficult to foresee a future when we won’t be wearing them. Mandatory mask wearing was introduced at midnight on July 22, despite conflicting medical and scientific advice about whether they actually make any difference. In my darker hours, I suspect that a government that has run out of ideas introduced the directive to cover our faces partly to give impression it is doing something. Anything.
But perhaps I’m overthinking it. This is what isolation does: gives you too much time to think. Plays tricks on your mind.
If wearing the masks is designed to make us feel less anxious about the future, it is having the opposite effect. How can anyone feel at ease about a way of life which requires you to cover your face to protect both yourself and others from the invisible damage we can do to each other?
Yet apart from a few selfish acts of defiance we have obediently complied with the decree and going maskless — even if it is allowed on a bike — creates a sense of being a pariah.
The masks also have the inadvertent effect of quiet. There is nothing to stop you talking with one on, but they inhibit conversation, as if our mouths have been sown shut. Having lost our voices, we talk instead with our eyes, rediscovering the value of eye contact and the expressions that they can convey.
But the masks also mean that the oppressiveness of lockdown now follows us everywhere we go. Confined to our homes for most of each 24-hour cycle — banned even from visiting our own family members — we cannot breathe fresh air now when we go outside. Instead, the air we breathe is stale from being trapped within our face coverings.
You can’t lock up a community forever. You can’t shut down an economy forever. Nor can you close your borders forever.
Each day we hold our breath waiting for the official statistics to come out: 317, 428, 217, 363, 275. The graph is like a roller coaster, and every day there are also new deaths to be reported. Yesterday there were 10, the largest daily total yet. But the stats have a lag, they can only tell us about the past rate of infection, not what is to come, and for this reason the scientists are now slightly more optimistic that they are close to having peaked.
While the numbers remain stubbornly high, most of us obediently follow the rules. Perhaps this is due to the uniquely Australian belief that we are bound together by collective unity, a tradition that goes back beyond federation and endures in our industrial relations system and social welfare safety nets. This is what distinguishes us from the US and the UK, the two nations we model ourselves on, the sense that we are all in this together.
How long that will last, who knows? There is a creeping sense of community-wide fatigue about the ongoing restrictions. The mandatory face coverings will be the real test of this, and so far, we have passed — but it is early days.
There has to be a limit to our tolerance for the economic and social destruction that is being wrought in the name of public health. At some stage, the dynamic will shift and the scientists and medicos who now control the agenda will surely find themselves thrust aside by the more urgent realpolitik of restarting the economy. That will be the moment when the unpleasant question is finally confronted of how much cost are the vast majority of us willing to bear for the preservation of life of a tiny minority. What value do we place on a life? Is it worth shutting down an entire city of 4 million? This is the question lurking in the shadows.
As Melbourne lives under the second lockdown and there is likelihood that Sydney could soon face the same, the debate has shifted to whether we should be pursuing a strategy of suppression or elimination.
Advocates for elimination point to the apparent success of New Zealand, which has not had a new case through community transmission for more than two months, and where community and business life has mostly got back to normal. But the entire population of New Zealand is not much more than Melbourne, and it is an isolated country at the end of the world that is currently allowing in only 400 visitors from overseas a day — roughly the same number of passengers as a single 747. It has not eliminated coronavirus; just stalled its progress.
The reality is that elimination is impractical and unachievable until there is a proven vaccine available. You can take extreme measures to contain and suppress the disease to provide the illusion of elimination — as New Zealand has done — but all it takes is one new case and you are back to square one and the distance to the horizon has been pushed back even further. The community will not have the patience or the tolerance to be required to get back in the merry-go-round again and again.
You can’t lock up a community forever. You can’t shut down an economy forever. Nor can you close your borders forever. So like it or not, we are going to have to learn to live with a base infection rate, adhere to precautionary and sanitation measures and get on with life like we do during flu season.
The virus has exposed not only structural weaknesses in our economy and gaping holes in our welfare system, but also significant fautlines over age, wealth and gender.
It has brought to the surface the conflict between baby boomers and millennials, with the former being the focus of the health response as they are most at risk of serious illness if they contract the virus; but the latter who are most feeling the brunt of the impact of the shutdown on their incomes, their housing, their jobs and their education. In raw terms, the future prospects of the young are being sacrificed for the health of the old.
No wonder young people are so resentful of their elders. Even before the pandemic, their inheritance consisted of a terminally sick planet, with home ownership out of reach and confronted by a cultural hegemony of boomer nostalgia. They look at their elders screwing up government, and now they find that as a result of the pandemic they are further condemned to low pay and constricted job choices.
The wealth divide is just as pronounced. It was the wealthy, those with the financial means to indulge in international travel, who first brought the virus into Australia from overseas holidays in places like Aspen or Europe. But it is the poor who have borne the consequences of a double hammer blow of higher rates of disease and the economic downturn.
While the wealthy have been able to bunker down at home and see out the lockdown in relative comfort, the poor have had no choice but continue to go to work to provide us with food, health care and essential services, to clean our buildings and serve us in shops.
So it is no coincidence that the parts of Melbourne most affected are lower income suburbs, and those most at risk of infection are those trapped in low-paid insecure work without the option of working from home but in jobs that require physical contact like food processing, manufacturing and aged care. Without an entitlement to paid leave, they cannot afford to call in sick as that would mean losing a day’s pay, so they go to work even though they may be infected, and it is in workplaces like those where the transmission rates have been worst.
Women are also bearing the brunt of the recession, losing their jobs and their hours of work at a faster rate than men, primarily because they are more likely to be trapped in casual and low-paid work in the first place and are over-represented in the industries, like retail and hospitality, most heavily impacted.
At times, it feels that life as we lived it before will never return. No longer will we be able to live on impulse or spontaneity.
In the meantime, we do what we can to keep us amused in isolation. We binge watch TV series and movies, we cook extravagant meals, we read and we learn new hobbies.
My own reading has leaned towards the existential and the dystopian, mostly re-reading old favourites in the search for new meaning: The Plague, of course, along with The Day of The Triffids. It is only a matter of time before the Kafka and Dostoevsky get dragged down from the shelves. Television is equally filled with dystopian, apocalyptic programming, including, with prescient timing, a new production of The War of the Worlds.
But there is only so much of this withdrawal from normality that you can take. During the first lockdown there was a novelty factor, but this time there is a palpable depression in the air and motivation ebbs ever lower.
After spending eight hours hunched over my computer each day, the prospect of returning to it at night often fills me with dread. It’s very tempting to just switch off, drink heavily and vegetate on the couch. It has got so wearisome that I’ve had to coax myself out of the house for my afternoon bike ride. And sometimes failed.
It is unlikely the pandemic will provide the inspiration for new books, movies, music that some predicted at the outset.
At times, it feels that life as we lived it before will never return. No longer will we be able to live on impulse or spontaneity. Humans being humans, we have the ingenuity to find new ways of doing things, whether it be livestreaming a gig into our living room, a virtual film festival, or feasting on a home delivered meal from a five-star restaurant.
But none of these are adequate replacements for what we had before, for the pure joy of witnessing four musicians on stage in a roomful of sweaty strangers with a cold beer in your hand, or the indulgence of being waited on hand and foot in a restaurant, or sitting in a darkened room watching a masterpiece being projected onto a large screen.
It’s hard at the moment to picture a world where any of this will be possible again. The rules have changed, probably forever, and many of the pleasures we took from life are gone. We will have to discover new pleasures.
Yet in spite of it all, it is still possible to find rare moments of beauty in the grimness of the current situation; hope amid the despair; and humour among the bleak.
Passing by the local pub, its windows dark and the doors bearing a sign saying it is closed until further notice, there is the absurd sight of a middle-aged man sitting by himself in the beer garden with the newspaper and a pint of beer, his face mask dangling below his chin, and an open fire crackling and glowing next to him. Who is he and how did he get there?
You wander outside and notice small signs of change among the desolation, some for worse, some for better. Perhaps it is the foundations being prepared for a new apartment block to replace an ugly old factory building; or the removal of scaffolding that has blocked the footpath in Sydney Road for a couple of years. Along the high black fence that shields a new building site from the Upfield bike path, someone has written in bold, tall green letters Always was. Always will be. And further up the path, on a disused grey concrete silo, the giant mural based on the iconic photograph Jacinda Ardern hugging a victim of the Christchurch massacre continues looks down over Brunswick.
Or maybe it is the arrival of new next-door neighbours, first home buyers in their late-twenties setting out on the next stage of life’s great adventure.
After a weekend of frantically moving in furniture and appliances, they turn up at the front door on a Sunday evening, their faces covered in masks, with a gift of a bottle of wine. You stand awkwardly on the doorstep talking for a few minutes, acutely conscious that in normal times you would invite them in, open the bottle and share a glass, but what was once socially acceptable is now verboten, so they go their way and you go yours.
Has the future been cancelled? Or merely postponed?
Perhaps the only answer is to live in the present.
