‘The trick is not to be isolated’
These days I imagine myself sitting in a window frame of a cozy home in California, holding a tapestry with a cat at my feet, an old record spinning on a turntable — like Carole King when she was younger, when the words “solitude” and “distance” were part of a conscious choice to stay or to leave.
“So far away… Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?”
Except that everything now is the opposite. This is no longer an era of romanticizing distance from our beloved. Distance has now become a moral and political choice — as two billion people worldwide were confined to their homes to curb the new coronavirus.
It’s not hard to see why. On this side of the world, a peep through our glass windows would reveal not only empty streets but members of the working class who have to choose economic survival every day — even if it meant risking their lives — without massive income support and free and comprehensive healthcare.
Distance means numbers. And the world is counting every day — from how fast the virus spreads to how many have died, how many countries are affected worldwide and how many new cases are added to the global list.
But there are things that we dismally quantify but could never really justify, like the shortage of protective equipment for our front-line health workers and our limited testing capacity, as more and more patients grapple with hospital beds and spaces in intensive care units that were already in short supply.
Often, the numbers we use to quantify distance are lopsided, so that they expose not only the struggles of physical detachment but also why not everyone has the power to detach. Not everyone can #stayathome.
This reveals the vulnerabilities of capitalist nations and the political malleability of governments amid the pandemic. Social distances have long existed with the institutional divide between the rich and the poor.
Just as police and military forces filled the streets which used to be vibrant with public life, a 69-year-old woman who had no choice but to make the streets her home was arrested in Manila for breach of peace and disobedience to authority. With cuffs slapped on her wrists, she was given a hefty penalty of P10,000.
In other invisible corners of our cities, some homeless persons and families fear for their lives in silence.
Peace is subjective. It’s a breach of peace to wake up every day without a reassuring government and to see our nurses and other front-line medical personnel forced to walk long distances to work.
An illusion of peace would no longer suffice for daily wage earners in our “essential” establishments who could only kneel in prayer, holding on to their faith because the system could no longer save them. There’s nothing peaceful in seeing a poor mother from the slums count the few coins left in her purse, bereft of her means of livelihood.
Does power still matter in the face of a pandemic? Apparently it does, when a long queue of privileged politicians and their cohorts were prioritized in testing, while ordinary citizens had to wait for days. Some had died even without getting their test results.
And now weeks into self-isolation, the distance among social classes grows more than ever.
In the absence of comprehensive public healthcare and massive testing, power builds more insulated glass walls for a few instead of shattering them. Power, like what Philippine senator and long-time politician Koko Pimentel has egregiously displayed when he contracted the disease, means having the audacity to cross so many lines without being accountable for it.
What this era of social distancing in the time of coronavirus has revealed is simple: An injury to one is an injury to all, which is also the motto of working-class movements around the world.
To be able to achieve genuine social solidarity, we need to look out for each other’s vulnerabilities. Despite the physical distances, we need to revive now more than ever our social bonds and shared values through individual and collective acts.
Public health is a common good. While it is more convenient to only peep through our glass windows in the comforts of our home, demanding a collective health commitment from the State is the least we could do to look out for the welfare of others.
A rights-based approach to health in the time of plague also means reflecting on the things that we have but others don’t, such as access to potable water, food supplies, and health services.
“The trick is not to be isolated―if you’re isolated, like Winston Smith in 1984, then sooner or later you’re going to break, as he finally broke. That was the point of Orwell’s story,” said philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky, a sobering reflection to George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”
“In fact, the whole tradition of popular control has been exactly that: to keep people isolated, because if you can keep them isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get together, all sorts of things are possible.”
We can’t let isolation destroy our solidarity. Despite the physical distance, we carry in our bodies and in the cells of our humanity the moral duty to protect not only ourselves but the vulnerable among us.
Now is the time to organize, so that every song we collectively sing at the top of our lungs on our balconies will not only serve as a coping mechanism but also a call to action. Because we have to — while we still can.
