In the second week of lockdown I began to feel the tethers of my world slip loose. It was neither concerning or unwelcome, merely different.
A coffee with a colleague was now an old memory. Shaking someone’s hand a kind of half-remembered and strangely visceral activity, far removed from the world of screens, of Zoom, of phones and messaging apps. Apart from my wife, my family became digital avatars. Physically, my world narrowed down.
Old movies – pre 2020 – with hugs and close greetings, or crowds and close contact, were as relevant to real life as silent newsreels of pre-WW1 parades in jerky sped-up time. Another time. Another life. Not now.
I learned to ration social media – where half-formed opinions and “I reckon” had grown like mould on decaying fruit, spreading spores of half-truth, sprouting discoloured bloomings of lies, anger, mistrust and venom. The search for blame spilled over, and media commentators who only weeks ago had told us we should all ‘open up’ were now laying blame on those who did exactly that: the constant ‘now’ of today’s musings having been completely cut loose from their musings of only days before. We were not to remember. It was somehow our duty not to remember, but rather to join in with tribal pile-ons at the merest hint of a mistake.
We all watched the borderline-insane rantings of ‘freedom’ from inarticulate Texans and Kansans, their browning roots peeking from underneath their MAGA hats. Then we realised they were among us, the American virus having crossed the ocean not via person-to-person contact but via Facebook and Twitter, streaming in hateful untruthful zeroes and ones through the underwater cable.
The virus took hold. People I thought I knew began spouting the old tribal lies. It was us against them. ‘They’ were the problem. Their food is wrong. Their hygiene is wrong. They’re communists. Or fascists. Or stupid. And we have let ‘them’ in. Our old underlying racism fought its tentacles to the surface. Having grown strong in the dark, it now was able to withstand the light, proudly disporting itself on the surface. The ugly canker spread, infecting the weak, providing simplistic solutions that were readily consumed, channeling its poison deep inside.
But it was not the Americans. Nor the Chinese. It was not foreigners and Muslims and Asians and our own indigenous people. It was us. All of us. We either fight the enemy within, or we succumb to its siren song, letting the poison have its reign in our hearts and minds. Become a carrier too.
And Covid-19? It’s just an actual virus. We know what do do about that.
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