Behaving responsibly

 

Subject: Behaving responsibly

It's easy to see how the conflicting claims about whether a certain area would be closed down such as in Wales or Manchester due to a surge in cov19 or whether the loss of ones livelihood comes first and businesses stay open. We are confused by how detrimental catching the virus is, people catch it and recover and people catch it and suffer a horrible death. Segments of the population, children and young people are far less effected medically but the poor are marginalised almost immediately not having managed to provide for themselves any sort of firebreak in terms of savings in the bank, within a few days they are scrambling to find money to pay the bills.

The gig economy in particularly has been hard hit since the nature of low paid non contractional work means that they don't qualify for the schemes set up by the government to pay, through the furlough scheme, 80% of earnings. From the business owners point of view, their life's work and a great deal of their capitol has been tied up in a business which will die if people are prevented from leaving their home. From the medical point of view the war against a very infectious. disease demands the immediate quarantining of people to break the link of infection and the fear that governments have of an apocalyptic event as hospitals become inundated with dying people.

How do we share the circle. How does the hospitality sector trump the NHS. Do holidays and entertainment in a pub feature so highly in our lives that we can't do without them until a vaccine is found. Does the 'Event Industry' the weddings and the outdoor live music concerts  carry more importance than a man or woman's life.

The statistician  perhaps places Covid 19 lower down on a list of killers and in some quarters we are asked to question why we make such a fuss over a million  dying when many millions die of malaria and over a million die in road accidents and that's not to mention how many die in conflict both domestic and militarily.

It could be argued then that death is not our overriding concern but the nature of the death and the sense of our vulnerability to the virus which seems to respect no one. We understand death in the elderly, in conflict zones, even from some types of illness such as cancer but this cross over virus from the animal kingdom has opened up a can of worms since the death toll in animals in the wild is greatly disproportionate. We have persuaded ourselves that we are in control and given the right treatment our own understanding of those diseases we are prone to can be countered to some degree but an unknown reservoir of disease from animals is quite another thing to contemplate.

There is also the modern assumption that we are protected from the unpleasantness of life as an inalienable right. We must have protection from financial damage, from physical damage, from emotional damage in fact any sort of damage has to be compensated for. We have created in the last thirty years a monkish fetish for overtly projecting our sadness towards people we can never have known as if they were members of our own family, the concept that humanity is an extension of us. Of course from a philosophical sense it is but from a practical point of view it isn't. We can't extend our compassion to everyone and from a sense of needing some sort of mental stability, we compartmentalise ourselves. Our understanding of death then is that we can protect ourselves from it by taking precautions and our anger at people who wantonly don't take precautions is understandable. The party goer in the street, the employer who wishes to get his workforce back to work at all costs irrespective of the danger are all signs of a dissolute society the "me" first society which neoliberal capitalism has bred into into large parts of the global society. My needs and to hell with the consequences is as ugly

aspect of modern man and women and whilst there has always been a disparity between the way we view others both within our society and foreigners who are seen as outliers. The virus in China was seen as their problem but now it's ours we wish to back away from the responsibility which we all have to behave responsibly.