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Featuring a stellar cast of Hollywood’s finest actors, Apple TV's Extrapolations was a bold attempt to center a TV narrative around the dangers of our future on a warming planet, yet failed to capture audiences. But where Extrapolations failed as an effective cautionary tale for society, it may have succeeded as one for filmmakers.
As Holocaust denial and falsehoods spread on social media, we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, a heroic act of resistance against oppression, with a sense of urgency. Let us remember the lessons of the uprising and stand up against racism and authoritarianism in all its forms.
The pandemic has been a clear demonstration that science is a method, not an endpoint. It is an ongoing process of hypothesising, testing, and interpreting the results of those tests through public policy. Though the hypothesis may be accepted or rejected, these interpretations are unlikely to be absolutely definitive statements or recommendations and are usually made with varying degrees of certainty.
What will it take, I wonder, to change these people’s minds? In an era as politically divisive as the one Americans (and Australians, for that matter) are living through, nothing is likely to convince detractors that COVID is an omnipresent threat — except perhaps the only thing with tangible currency in this whole blasted catastrophe: the visceral consequences of the pandemic itself.
The pandemic has lit up the areas in which our neoliberal economies are basically unfit for the purpose of providing healthy and safe environments — whether it be privatised aged care homes and quarantine services or ‘the gig economy’, which forces sick people to ‘soldier on’ infecting people as they go. One area that has been rather less considered, however, is disability.
Six months grounded and I’d forgotten how to fly. I was due to take my first COVID-era flight, a brief flip from my home in Sydney to Ballina on the NSW mid-north coast for a meeting a few weeks ago. But I wasn’t ready.
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.
This time last year I was smuggling contraband into one of the world’s most inaccessible places of exile. I’d stared down nervously as we descended onto the island’s lofty runway — a strip of ribbon ending abruptly high above the sea.
All this is pleasant and unremarkable, except that we were just briefly discussing which future events are likely cancelled in light of the announced pandemic. It’s an unexpected morning topic for conversation before coffee. But it’s appropriate with the increasing concerns on flattening the curve of contagion, illness, infections, acute complications and death.
We are living in a time of pandemic but it seems so many people have been more focused on panic buying or flouting restrictions on social distancing and public gatherings. Why is it that many are less concerned about the virus than what they can buy or do?
Under such conditions, it is hard to get people to concede that what they believe might be incomplete. No one wants to give anything up. This is an attempt to get people to give something up. Here is how to do it: ask what is the worst that can happen. Then accept that it may have already happened. But not to you.
The earthworms and bees were the first to know, wrote Nobel laureate and Belarusian native Svetlana Alexievich. The bees stayed in their hives; the worms buried themselves so deep that fishermen digging for bait on the banks of the Pripyat River were perplexed that they couldn't find any. The humans were slower to learn.