Historian Rebecca Solnit is the best writer on disasters and societal response, the genius who gave us "A Paradise Built in Hell." Her latest Guardian column,could not be more cogent or timely.
theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…
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theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…
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The crisis made the impossible possible: extending workers' rights, freeing prisoners, finding trillions for relief.
Crisis (med): "Crossroads of recovery and death"
Emergency: From "emerge" - from the familiar into a new posture
Catastrophe: Root is "sudden overturning."
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Crisis (med): "Crossroads of recovery and death"
Emergency: From "emerge" - from the familiar into a new posture
Catastrophe: Root is "sudden overturning."
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The lessons of disaster: everything is connected, weakness is revealed (and so is strength). It's a spring thaw for power, when the ice that seemed utterly solid shatters and we slip through.
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Who benefits from the shattering? Often those whose priority is reestablishing order, rather than helping those in crisis. They seize and consolidate power, suspend rights, use insider knowledge to enrich themselves.
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They prioritize property over people, which is where "elite panic" springs from: characterizing the things ordinary people need to do merely to survive as "looting" or "squatting" - hence shoot-to-kill orders after Hurricane Katrina.
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Billionaires are ordering their workers to stay on the job. Hobby Lobby's religious maniac owners told workers God would protect them. The Uihleins, Trump insiders, gagged workers who had symptoms to avoid "unnecessary panic."
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Paychex founder Tom Golisano said "The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people." (He says people "misinterpreted" his statement.)
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This is the pandemic-accelerated version of historic practices, like working children to death or operating unsafe mines or sweatshops, burning oil and cooking the world -- prizing "the lifeless thing that is profit over living beings."
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Doing them fast makes them impossible to ignore, but they're not really any different Hobby Lobby's owner forcing workers to risk their lives to sell crafting supplies.
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Pandemic's revealed interconnectedness is incompatible with capitalist doctrines of individualism. This interconnectedness is a longstanding scientific consensus. That's why the right is so hostile to science: reality has a leftist bias.
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The right's rejection of coronavirus science - insisting on keeping businesses and churches open - isn't an aberration, it's just a vivid example of the longstanding denialism over everything from abortion to the climate crisis. The pandemic makes slow things fast.
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The pandemic crisis reveals our true natures. Everyday people engage in selfless acts of charity and generosity and mutual aid. Rich people cower in bunkers and insist that we all need to get back behind the wheels of our Ubers.
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Solnit holds out hope that when this ends, we'll learn from it: "I wonder if we will rethink how we were linked, how we moved about and how the goods we rely on moved about."
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"The wave of privatisation that has characterised our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds."
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The 1972 quake in Managua brought about a revolution: "Once you realised that your life can be decided by one night of the Earth deciding to shake, [you thought]: ‘So what? I want to live a good life and I want to risk my life, because I can also lose my life in one night.’"
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Pandemic upends impossibility: "Ireland nationalised its hospitals. Canada came up with four months of basic income for those who lost their jobs. Germany did more than that. Portugal decided to treat immigrants and asylum seekers as full citizens during the pandemic."
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The 2008 crisis gave us Occupy, and that gave us new discourses about inequality, student debt, #MedicareForAll. We go into this crisis with all that in hand.
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Patrisse Cullors's #BlackLivesMatter mission statement: "Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation. Rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams."
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There's no going back: "Ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality."
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