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A commonly heard phrase, or rather media cliché, is that after the COVID-19 crisis ‘things will never be the same.’ It is an understandable sentiment, given the seemingly unprecedented nature of recent events. But how novel is what happened, and how much will actually change?
Public mask wearing — including ‘a piece of cloth, a scarf, bandana, t-shirt, or paper towel’ — was hot on the global public health agenda. One major demographic, however, had trouble fashioning this expert advice: men.
Ah, how they floated in the clouds, back before the first world war, those decent heady phrases: the common good, the living wage and how they came across the seas, those writers and professors, to study what we’d done down here.
Our frontliners are usually our younger workers. They are the ones trying to pay rent or save a deposit on a house. They are the ones trying to cope with children, the costs of child care and space for their accommodation and play. And yet we depend on them in a crisis like COVID-19, and we pay them less.
The dweller in the bone attic holds countryside as home; thinks of food, safety, health and warmth for family, self and group. Frenetic scuffles rage in the brick canyons where the hunt is commerce and food constructed.
Over the weekend in most Australian states, rules requiring people to stay home were relaxed somewhat. The country has commenced its easing of the significant restrictions on venturing out in public. As we begin to reacquaint ourselves with life outside, it is useful to reflect on the new resonance of ‘home’ — but also on its inherent limits.
Another biblical motif or metaphor may prove more fruitful in the long run: the apocalypse. No, not the end of the world, however appropriate this may feel. It’s the apocalypse but not as we know it.
After building a reputation for foreign intervention and collateral damage — the most recent example being Libya — the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is asserting its influence during the COVID-19 pandemic, this time by exploiting the humanitarian paradigm.
We have done a lot right as a nation during the pandemic, but on the whole we have not treated foreigners as well as we might have. The inequality of treatment has been in evidence during the twin health and economic crises brought on by COVID-19.
For millions of Australians of varying degrees of religiosity, prayer will play a key role in dealing with the novel stresses associated with this novel virus. Religions bring us not just closer to our creator but also to each other, especially in times of crisis. And you don’t have to be devout to feel the blessing.
Illness, so apparently explicit and ever more obvious as it progresses, in fact defies definition: submitting apparently to scientific and medical description, it escapes into a quality of pain, exquisite loss or appalled helplessness that is often most clearly captured at the heart of great works of art.
While there have been endless social media posts, political campaigns and the like about staying safe by staying at home, I have been concerned about the many people who are not safe at home and what this may mean to them. What will this mean for the woman who’s been living with a domestic violence perpetrator for years?