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I can’t be the only one who has, in recent weeks, found myself reaching for my dog-eared copy of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional re-telling of the 1665 great plague of London.
The internet and the online spaces are indeed becoming our lifeline for expression and assembly. This lifeline is under threat and deserves much more protection than it currently has under international law. We now have an immediate opportunity to remedy that.
Who knew that the greatest moral debate of our time would be whether or not to wear a mask? Having sewed my first mask many weeks ago, I’ve been following the millions of words written and spoken on the efficacy of masks, whether to wear them, who should wear them, how to use them, and how to make them. In a genre that is already bending my brain, there is a special sub-category of mask-shaming.
In these troubled times of COVID-19, most news bulletins concentrate on the daunting figures from Italy, Spain, Britain and the USA. Little countries don’t get much of a mention. Greece is a little country.
Even during this period of disruption (and, indeed, even because of it) it is so important that we pay attention to the bigger picture. So much of what we do now will lay the groundwork for the kind of future that we are able to build at end of this crisis.
After almost 14 years under an Israel imposed economic blockade, as well as coming under bombing, most recently on the 27th of March, Gaza is struggling. Medical and food supplies are rundown, many houses are in ruins, power is intermittent, and there are water quality and sanitation issues.
While I stay by my mother, I glean only the edges of the news; already the horror of the fires has been at full stretch. In the quiet room where my mother lies, I think of people trying to sleep in unfamiliar environments, refugees from the fires.
One of the challenges posed by social distancing is how to reconcile personal presence with distance. Presence is tactile and up close. Measuring out the prescribed separation as people walk around the park in the early morning tends to turn familiars into strangers and greetings into distancings.
Melbourne in summer & the weather is grand & blazing, proof that global warming is real. At my age I allow myself to be surprised.
Unfortunately, when it comes to limiting our emissions there’s no silver bullet, and there’s unlikely to be one before we hit an increase of 1.5 degrees. However, scientists do say that we already have all the technology we need to get to net-zero. What we don’t have is the political willpower.
This behaviour did not come out of nowhere. It has been carefully cultivated through over 40 years of neoliberal economic policies that have made it blatantly clear to people that they are on their own and will absolutely be left to fall if they don’t scramble their way to the top of the heap — supported, if necessary, by their own accumulated rolls of toilet paper.
Pride is politically messy. When you stir together an alphabet soup of people, all of which have other intersecting identities (race, class, religion, political allegiance), you will invariably plate up a political mess. And the 2020 Sydney Mardi Gras dished quite the menu.