Hope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap
- Hilary Mantel
There’s a scene in Feng-I Fiona Roan’s film American Girl — a third culture story of a diaspora family returning to Taiwan — where the mother pushes a pile of N95 masks toward her husband as he packs his bags for a business trip. The year is 2003 and across the news on the family’s television are reports of the growing SARS outbreak in the region. The husband waits until his wife leaves the room before removing the masks from his belongings and leaving them behind. When he returns to the apartment the woman sprays the man with a sanitising solution and he exasperatedly bats her away. When the youngest daughter becomes ill the man admonishes the woman for taking the girl to the hospital to be tested. The mother and the eldest daughter have a tense relationship, but manage to connect briefly after a violent episode in the home:
Mom, remember we once talked about what animal we’d like to be in our next life?
You said you’d like to be a horse.
And do you remember what your answer was?
No, I don’t.
You said you’d like to be a boy.
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In All About Love bell hooks writes that cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart. It is therefore natural that cynicism and bitterness can so often herald burnout. We can start - preemptively, self-protectively - to look at even seemingly good and pure things as suspect or flimsy if our experiences have involved rug-pulling, gaslighting, the sustained exploitation of goodwill, or even just the sustained exploitation of our survival instinct. The sheer can’t-go-on of burnout is often proportionate the extraction and exhaustion of hope, energy, effort, care, thought and life that we have been through. Our lifeforce is used to generate and capture capital that is whisked away from us daily, propped up and bailed out as too big to fail, while our working class lifeforce is too small to matter - too small for us to manage ourselves our earthly labour, beyond domination, as neighbours.
September 2022 has seen sweeping removals of public health protections and even the removal of pandemic status in some jurisdictions. The end of public health measures is not based on the ending of the pandemic but based on the desire to end public health measures. The metric of success is not the reduction of cases but the reduction of restrictions. It is a policy driven by market senses: how things look and how things feel. The fewer restrictions there appear to be, the more normal public life can feel, the more we can generate capital. The more we can privatise protections (you do you, stay home if you are so nervous), the more the public sphere can belong to the able-bodied, the more normal things can look and feel, the more people have to privatise the dissonance of living through a pandemic alongside the norms of normal.
The aim of ending protections is to generate a confidence-building set of affects for some critical kind of mass. The aim is to provide the much-needed certainty New Zealanders and business need, helping to drive greater economic activity, as Jacinda Ardern said at the protection framework abolition press conference on September 12th. Finally, rather than feeling that COVID dictates what happens to us, our lives, and our futures, we take back control, Ardern said. Or, as Joe Biden said at the Detroit Auto Show on September 18th …the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one's wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it's changing. What you choose to notice becomes what is accepted as real. The fewer restrictions there appear to be, the more we can seem to be in pretty good shape, the more we can seem to be in control, the more we can be certain, the more we can—
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I’m having fun in my own skin and in my own mind. I’m reading again. I’m asking questions with people and we are making trust between us via barbs and sparks. We don’t have to agree, but by sticking around long enough we are agreeing that we all matter, and that’s what matters. I am laughing a lot. And then all of a sudden I am not. A fear of disappointment lurks in giddy moments. That burned-out, self-protective recoil from the sun of seeming goodness for fear of another sticky-winged fall. Individualised deaths. Individualised responsibilities. Individualised experiences. So much labour to give to capital to try to pay the cost of living under these conditions that take and take and take our lifeforce.
If the definition of a pandemic involves some state of exception then the pandemic may, indeed, be over for those with power - death and disability are out of sight, essential workers have lost the hero sheen, quick treatment rules above deep prevention, and limited welfare is back to being highly conditional rather than a blanket protection. The social contract for the most exploited has been broken for a long time. The literal contract here — Te Tiriti o Waitangi — was signed by captains of empire with fingers crossed behind their backs. But tangata whenua have made some headway by working together inside the contradiction of the famous chant: the Treaty’s a sham, honour the Treaty. We don’t win freedom by banishing contradiction or by desperately seeking certainty. We don’t end a pandemic by saying its over.
As legal historian Nate Holdren wrote this month on Harvard Law School’s Bill of Health blog, “our goal should be to bring the pandemic to a substantive end — by promoting justice and actual human health — rather than by bringing it to a merely ideological end by normalizing social murder. In the longer term, our goal should be to end the social patterns that make this society murderous in so many ways — to make this the last such catastrophe, rather than what threatens to be one of many as the global climate emergency continues to worsen. I admit I find all of this an incredibly daunting prospect. Still, aside perhaps from sheer luck, there is no other starting place from which we can reasonably expect this nightmare to truly end.”
To read Holdren’s words is not to feel doom, but to experience that leap in the heart that the wonderful late Mantel talked about. A stranger with something brave to say. Hope in the dark.
Until next month,
H x
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