Lockdown dawn
It has been a strange week in level 3 of lockdown. The long silences of the mornings in lockdown proper — as I’m starting to think of it — are gone. Level 3 is audibly louder than the last two months have been. The sounds of cars and people on foot on their way to work, despite the predawn chill hanging in the damp air. Each of the earliest footfalls, around half-past four in the morning, reaches into that most delicious of states, the eddying cocoon between asleep and awake, holding me briefly in its embrace this morning.
I know he’s in the bedroom, I can just about hear his breathing at the doorway. For such a large animal, the Bear is uncannily stealthy — earning him the #ninjazenbeardog moniker amongst others. Like heroes in folklore Bearski is known by many names amongst different people. The stuff of legends has awoken and padded silently up the passageway to my current sleeping quarters. A cold and wet muzzle follows if the initial Wake up, Wake up! (said in Labrador) does not stir me.
This morning, I’m almost fully awake and I’m spared the wet nose. Fifteen minutes later we’re making our way across the street and around the neighbourhood. The mist hangs in front of us and each time I exhale, I add to the ephemeral milky, brown, and green, world in front of my eyes. And if like me, you’re wearing the regulation mask with prescription spectacles, then you are literally blinded by mist. Thankfully there are masks with little bits of wire for the nose bits, so you can pinch it snugly over your nose and actually see where you’re going.
People are bundled up against the single digit early winter mornings. It’s like a back-to-normal of early mornings as it was in the pre-corona era. Strangely comforting and not a little unsettling. Comforting because it’s what I have known all of my life. Busy weekday mornings and quieter weekend mornings. I feel like I got two months of weekend mornings, some of them drenched in that dreamy, warmly lit and temperate quality that comes with holiday mornings. That was in lockdown proper, in Autumn, which in a small village on the periphery of Durban, is much like summer, only milder. In the grey chill of this morning, it feels and sounds like the holy land is getting back to business as usual.
Unsettling because only about half the people I encounter in the few kilometers of morning walk are wearing masks and physical distancing does not appear to be the norm. People can still be found walking in groups. It’s unsettling because we seem to be on a global surge — ‘new cases of the novel coronavirus are rising worldwide, at a rate of more than 100,000 a day over a seven-day average.’ We’re relaxing movement controls just at the time the infections appear to be on the rise — this can’t bode well for us. It looks to me that we are low-key switching over to the Swedish herd immunity model to deal with the Corona virus pandemic. That’s about as sobering news as one could ask for and — let’s hope the mad Swedes have got this thing figured.
Into this global tinderbox of a silently killing virus and economic instability drops the killing of George Floyd; prompting (amongst other things) the biggest self-propelled, free, public, co-created, online, adult education course on racial justice. In the history of humankind.
We now know that a subject of deep complexity and with a multiplicity of narratives can be co-created and shared rapidly — across all platforms by a range of affected people, experts, allies, friends, professionals, academics and occasionally even government or quasi government people, organisations and movements. That’s a win. Resources for understanding the moment, the backstory and getting in on the narrative that was patently alien to many people showed that we can quickly and collectively learn pretty much anything, that is important enough to us. If Karens against police brutality is anything to go by, the education campaign is starting to do its work.
The brief conflagration that was downtown Minneapolis last week, is but a flicker of what is still to come. And while we’re here, let’s remember that it’s not advisable to eat ribs with one hand.
The spark that was the public execution of George Floyd, has also set alight people’s positive qualities. We have seen what is possible when we dump the learned prejudices and just be human first. The solidarity action by bus drivers in Minneapolis refusing to deliver arrested protestors to jail is one example of how each of us can do something to support a moment in our collective human history. This is no doubt hard work, for anyone — much less people who have benefited from the generational privilege or even just their own lifetime of privilege.
Gary Younge summed it up in a tweet last week; “These deaths are the collateral damage of racism. And since we didn’t get to this place by accident, we won’t get out of it by chance.”
The global agri-business model of food production is becoming more directly linked to the rise and spread of the novel Corona virus. In, COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism: Commodity Chains and Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic Crises, Foster and Suwandi assert that we have a deep economic crisis on our hands. A crisis that could cause actual system-wide collapse. They describe our economic system as catastrophe capitalism — and describe the current Covid-19 pandemic as ‘simply another dramatic manifestation’ of the failed economic order we have followed until now.
Anything short of direct systemic change is going to be a poor band-aid solution. How we go about doing this, is what we’re going to be ‘doing live’ for the foreseeable future. While we live these days, the major work is actually dismantling our current system of rabid capitalism and creating new, egalitarian and just systems; that serve the interests of more than a privileged, racial minority.
Foster and Suwandi go on to describe the notion of the Lauderdale Paradox (according to which private riches are enhanced by the destruction of public wealth) coined by Robert Wallace. And that’s just one cog of a whole set of moving parts that fit together to give us this drain on the Earth’s resources for private capital gain.
And, let’s not forget, this system is allowed and enabled by our elected politicians. And the militarised police forces of the world are accountable to those same politicians that enable rabid capitalists access to public resources which they trade for private profit. And in the holy land, (like in much of the world) this entire system of wealth is built on the backs of black labour. From mining the gold, to pushing toddlers around suburban parks, doing the laundry, keeping the lawn immaculately trimmed and walking the pugs.
We owe it to ourselves to manifest something much better than this current sham, in the name of human civilisation, circa 2020.
