Week 52: 2020

At the start of 2020, I started a weekly blog series. That, like so many other things this year, did not really bear fruit.

But also like many other things this year, it is just about still going, battling on in an ever more hostile world, against all odds. I’m maybe almost starting to enjoy it: the realisation that that no one is really going to care if these posts are beautifully structured or not has been a huge help. Also, the realisation that since I can write about whatever I want, I don’t have to write about myself.

But trying to write about 2020 is difficult without writing about yourself. We’ve all spent a little more time in our own heads since March, had a little too much of our own company. The story of 2020 has been reflected in each of our lives: how can we think about the pandemic, about lockdown, without also thinking of our personal, first-hand experience of it?

The strangest thing about 2020 for me was the sense of unity. Like no other year in my life, this year has been pretty much identical for pretty much everyone. It’s clear that differences in class have meant lockdown has been vastly different depending on how much money you earn, but the basic narrative has been the same. Fear, doubt, angst, isolation. The mess of conflicting narratives which my university tutors termed “modernity”; everything happening all at once; has just stopped, thanks to a small, spiky virus, and suddenly we’re all the same. Fear, doubt, angst, isolation.

So what has it proved? What have we learnt?

Things can be done differently. Our society can survive rapid, widespread change of habits. Pollution levels dropped incredibly over the past year, and yet food production was largely unaltered. Nationalised health industries can effortlessly take over private facilities and provide better healthcare for those who actually need it. And most strikingly for me, the UK homelessness crisis can literally be solved in a weekend. For a few brief months during the first lockdown, any person on the streets was entitled to a hotel room. The reasons people sleep on the streets are manifold, but it is well, well within the ability of the sixth largest economy in the world to solve its homelessness crisis.

Science is important, and so are the Arts. Science brought us a vaccine in 11 months; art will sustain us while we wait. Can you imagine what would’ve happened if the pandemic had happened in 1990? No Netflix, no smartphones, no movies on demand, no prestige TV, no spotify, no YouTube, no video games, no e-books: only endless reruns of 90s sitcoms called What Are You Like?!? to send us dribbling mindlessly towards death’s warm embrace.

We are Interdependent. On an individual and a national level. The first UK citizens would not have received the vaccine last week if not for the Chinese sequencing the genome, an Iranian immigrant couple living in Germany synthesising an m-RNA-based immune response, then passing it to our NHS. And on a personal level, we have relied on our friends and families like never before.

Misery begets misery. The primary effects are obvious; the secondary effects less so. And the tertiary effects are often invisible. It’ll probably be five or ten years until as a society we can reckon with the full impact of the coronavirus crisis. The health problems which have gone undiscovered, the drinking habits which have started, the latent xenophobia which crackles beneath official statements and newspaper articles and Whatsapp discussions.

Then there’s the fact that obviously, the pandemic has affected the poorer so much worse. Every difference in lifestyle has a compounding effect on the likelihood of a poorer person catching coronavirus, and dying from it. Poorer nutrition, poorer healthcare, cramped living conditions, jobs which you can’t do from home. Meanwhile, in case you didn’t catch the headline, the world’s billionaires have got $1.9 trillion richer in 2020.

Everyone is vulnerable. Anyone can need help. Having said that, the virus does not discriminate once it’s infected someone. And it does not discriminate in shutting down people’s livelihoods, ruining their future plans, or killing their loved ones. The idea that people can be truly self-sufficient has been categorically disproved this year, and bear in mind that’s one of the fundamental assumptions of conservative thought. Which brings me to my ultimate point here…

Right-wing politics is fundamentally incapable of running a society. It is staggering how badly some of the most technologically advanced, militarily capable, intellectually brilliant nations have handled this. Making sweeping statements about politics in general is always risky, but it seems fairly obvious that if you were to plot nations on the traditional left-right political continuum, and then plot the same nations according to how well they’d managed the coronavirus pandemic, you’d more or less be looking at the same graph.

Who’s done well? New Zealand, Taiwan, Germany, Norway, Finland, China, Canada.

Who’s done OK? Indonesia, Italy, France, Netherlands, South Africa.

Who’s done badly? USA, UK, Iran, Mexico, Brazil.

This is oversimplified, of course. There’s so many other factors at play. And yes, the reason nations like China did well is because citizens knew that if they didn’t stay home when the government told them to, they could be tortured and murdered by their government. I don’t think this is ideal.

But what is also not ideal is the utter fucking stupidity of the UK/US response. The mindless it’ll be fiiine, not wanting to upset the stock market. The selfish actions of senior government figures who consider themselves above the rules. The government contracts which are privatised, given to mates, for projects which turn out not to work and to cost the economy about the price of an Olympic games. And the libertarian mentality which is becoming more popular in Tory voters: you can’t tell me what to do. It’s my own choice how much risk I should take. The brain-dead, mindless, head-smacking-against-the-wall refusal to accept the fact that ANYTHING YOU DO COULD PUT OTHERS IN DANGER.

Sorry to sound so zealous, so demeaning. But time and time again this year I have stared, dumbfounded, at some tweet or news story, and thought: Right wing thought just cannot handle this pandemic.

Recently I’ve been trying to educate myself on economics, and I’ve been made aware enough of free market economics to not trash it straight away, on impulse. I recognise now that there’s no better wealth generating machine. But a) it’s a wealth generating machine for those who already have wealth, and b) it only makes sense as a political system as long as there is never a crisis.

BUT CRISES HAPPEN.

TO EVERYONE.

The unique thing about 2020 is that a crisis happened to everyone at the same time. The fear and desperation felt, even by the rich, is how the poor feel all the time. To structure our entire society around a system which faints at the first sign of trouble; to run our lives according to Gilderoy-Lockhart-Capitalism, is ruinous as further crises darken the horizon.

Right now, in the dying embers of 2020, it seems like our best options are social welfare programs, the eradication of political lobbying and large political donations, investments in healthcare, and the end to stakeholder-capitalism, where any profits are instantly snapped up by rich investors, rather than put into reserve. Selfish thinking just cannot take us any further.