[WSMDiscuss] [WSM] Discussion of Rebecca Solnit's 'The impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us about hope

[John Foran]

Thanks, all, for your responses and constructive engagements with my desire
to enrich this conversation by bringing in the author themself.  This is
what we are here for.

I didn't ask permission to do so, and I am glad that that hasn't become the
issue.  We are a good group, and we handle ourselves and support each other
very well when, as we should, we have different views of a complex reality
and historical moment (to say the least).

It is important to acknowledge that we are all on the same side, which I
wholeheartedly believe, and I am honored to stand there beside each and
every one of you.

John

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 9:01 AM John Holloway <johnholloway at prodigy.net.mx>
wrote:

> Just a quick response, if I may, because I would like to come in in more
> detail at some point. I appreciated very much Jai’s and Laurence’s comments
> and shared their criticism of Rebecca’s “we”. On the other hand, I very
> much share Rebecca’s insistence that the all-important thing in this moment
> is to think hope. And I also admit, somewhat guiltily, that I share her
> “we”: I’m enjoying my isolation very much and suspect that a lot of
> academics and others are too. It’s a liberating rupture of normality.
> Guiltily, of course, because it is obvious that the hardship and brutality
> that it involves for a very big part of the world’s population is likely to
> intensify. In that, Arundhati Roy’s article contrasts with and complement’s
> Rebecca’s. But we have to think and act our way through Arundhati’s portal.
> Now is the moment of Hic Rhodus, hic salta, as Raoul Vaneigem put it in his
> communication of a couple of days ago. Now we are confronted with a real
> rupture that we have to take advantage of.
>
>
>
> Greetings from a quiet, sunny day in Mexico. John
>
>
>
> *From: *WSM-Discuss <wsm-discuss-bounces at lists.openspaceforum.net> on
> behalf of "Brian K. Murphy" <brian at radicalroad.com>
> *Reply-To: *Discussion list about emerging world social movement <
> wsm-discuss at lists.openspaceforum.net>
> *Date: *Monday, April 13, 2020 at 10:33 AM
> *To: *Jai Sen <jai.sen at cacim.net>
> *Cc: *Rebecca Solnit <rsolange at earthlink.net>, Post WSMDiscuss <
> wsm-discuss at lists.openspaceforum.net>
> *Subject: *Re: [WSMDiscuss] [WSM] Discussion of Rebecca Solnit's 'The
> impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us about hope
>
>
>
> Hello, Jai. Thanks for the invitation, but I will pass.
>
>
>
> Rebecca Solnit’s essay that I posted to WSMdiscuss stands perfectly well
> on its own, and does not need me to re-elaborate or interpret it—that is,
> to use a term that Solnit made famous over a decade ago, it does not
> require my (or anyone’s) ‘mansplaining.’
>
>
>
> I was not comfortable with the discussion of the essay as it had unfolded
> and therefore was grateful and relieved by John Foran’s (very gentle and
> generous) prod (I could not figure out a way without being experienced as
> aggressive, and maybe rude, which is not what I would want).
>
>
>
> I know that you always try to encourage respect, mutuality, and dialogue
> in WSM exchanges, although we do not always hit the mark. Frankly, though,
> I cannot imagine any reason that Ms Solnit would want to engage at all at
> this point.
>
>
>
> In solidarity,
>
>
>
> Brian
>
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 13, 2020, at 10:55 AM, Jai Sen <jai.sen at cacim.net> wrote:
>
> Monday, April 13, 2020
>
> Hi Brian
>
>             Some time ago (… days, weeks, I’m not sure any more; these
> days, it sometimes feels as if time is collapsing and unravelling at the
> same time..), you responded to my first post saying :
>
> "And yet?”.  Was not that precisely her point, Jai.  ?
>
>             I responded, and then so did Laurence, and Tord also joined
> in.  Leaving aside the little question that so far, it’s all been males
> responding, can I ask you to now come in and tell us what you had in mind
> when you asked me that question ?  What, for you, *was Rebecca Solnit’s
> point ?
>
>             And since John Foran has now invited Rebecca to also come in,
> if she would like to, I’m therefore now of course also copying her in…
>  Please do come in, if you would like to.
>
>             In solidarity,
>
>             Jai
>
> PS : John, thanks of course for coming in as you have, and for thinking of
> inviting Rebecca to join in, if she would like to.  Certainly, for me
> anyway this makes every sense !
>
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 12, 2020, at 5:37 PM, John Foran <foran at soc.ucsb.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
> Well colleagues, a very interesting discussion, and I think it would be
> good to see what Rebecca replies, if she has the bandwidth, because we
> should all know each other and be in dialogue, which I know is the
> intention of this group.
>
>
>
> in solidarity with you all, and in gratitude to all, and very much, to
> Rebecca,
>
>
>
> John
>
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 2:46 AM Laurence Cox <Laurence.Cox at mu.ie> wrote:
>
> Hi Tord,
>
>
>
> Thanks for that!
>
>
>
> And very good to hear that this isn’t so strong in your circles. With the
> US and UK so much in decline, the tendency of their parliamentary lefts to
> define themselves as the global centre of political gravity is …
> problematic. And I suppose in Ireland we’re particularly exposed to that
> for linguistic reasons as much as anything.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> Laurence
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Well written Laurence!
>
> "In a sense this is fair enough – readers want to consume a product, and
> something like a Guardian long read is a prescribed form for a given
> audience: the think-y members of its largely Anglophone,
> to-the-left-of-liberal audience, looking to consume a certain kind of
> experience in the ten minutes they give to it. To ask a piece like this to
> propose movement strategy is a bit like asking the same of a TV box set.
>
> But what marks the weakness of much of our movements, I think, is the
> extent to which activists circulate these pieces as though they might offer
> hope to hang on to – as though we are not, in fact, managing to sustain our
> own “intellectual means of production”, but gain pleasure from seeing “one
> of ours” in the Guardian, singing in the right key."
>
> The last part I do not see much in our environmental, peace and solidarity
> circles in Sweden and or international connections. But I can guess there
> is a a lot anglophone clickbait people like that as you say so. And among
> the left you find a lot of obsession about Corbyn, Sanders or whatever is
> the recent hope for statecentric liberal left to believe there is hope for
> parliamentarian gains.
>
> Less so in our circles that rather believe in simultaneous struggles in
> all countries beyond statecentrism or the other anglophone comical
> strategy, think globally act locally, long live grassroots and their local
> projects that I from above can write about. They do have an audience in
> Sweden as well together with the latest UN win win strategy together with
> corporations. But I do not see much of them either, they have their own
> ecochambers and seldom touch upon issue of opposing making public sector,
> nature and working condition a commodity or opposing wars.
>
> Tord Björk
>
> email: tord.bjork at gmail.com, skype: tordbjork, tel: +46 (0)722 15 16 90
>
> address: Götgatan 7 A, 29133 Kristianstad, Sweden
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 12:41 AM Laurence Cox <Laurence.Cox at mu.ie> wrote:
>
> I share some of Jai’s feelings here – notably the “we who?” question.
>
> Solnit writes brilliantly and inspiringly. *Hope In the Dark *is a
> fantastic piece of work. This one – understandably given the speed of
> events – is less so. There are inaccuracies (she is wrong about Ireland and
> about the Black Death). More to the point, there is also a mawkishness that
> doesn’t suit her:
>
> We are only in the early stages of this disaster, and we are also in a
> strange stillness. It is like the Christmas truce of 1914, when German and
> English soldiers stopped fighting for a day, the guns fell silent and
> soldiers mingled freely. War itself paused.
>
> And then war continued, with renewed force.
>
> It doesn’t help, of course, that her examples are relentlessly US-centric,
> because they have to find light in a disaster:
>
> The 2008 financial collapse led to 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising,
> which prompted a new reckoning with economic inequality and a new scrutiny
> of the human impact of exploitative mortgages, student loans, for
> profit-colleges, health-insurance systems and more, and that in turn
> amplified the profiles of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, whose ideas
> have helped pull the Democratic party to the left, towards policies that
> will make the US fairer and more equal.
>
> “That aged well”, as they say.
>
> But the bigger difficulty is with the “we” this is addressed to. It isn’t
> written for a movement vanguard of any kind; it is written to be consumed.
> It has been extraordinarily painful this past few weeks to see the
> sidelining of agency in so much that radical writers have produced: the
> repeated use of the preacher’s “we” simultaneously to decry “our” past sins
> and to invoke the possibility of “our” future awakening on the basis of
> some putatively common feeling – which exists no more in the Guardian’s
> English home than in the US or Australia where so much of its global
> readership lives. That fake “we” sits alongside the mechanical determinism
> of “bad thing X (the virus) will cause good thing Y” – which, as Gramsci
> observed a century ago, speaks to moments of despair but not for moments of
> active challenge to power.
>
> This specific piece doesn’t erase agency altogether – but Solnit places
> her hope in the equivalent of “the next generation”, people experiencing a
> quasi-religious shift in meaning as a result of crisis, becoming better and
> more human. It is of course true for some – but as we can see anywhere in
> the world that people have experienced “the proximity of death in shared
> calamity”, there is no automatic effect of this kind. I’m not sniping to
> say that it may be an effect of privilege, and of being able to choose to
> encounter these situations as a visitor, to interpret them in this way, a
> bit like people who volunteer in hospices for religious or spiritual
> reasons. Their reasons may be good and the help is surely welcome – but how
> they experience them is probably not how most staff, patients or family
> experience them. One of the few reliable outcomes of repeatedly
> experiencing the proximity of death in shared calamity is trauma.
>
> I live in a country marked by the mass graves and empty fields of a famine
> that killed an eighth of the population, forced another eighth into
> emigration within a decade, and another quarter over the decades that
> followed. Whole villages and in some cases wider areas were depopulated for
> ever; to this day you can walk into the hills and see the lines where
> starving people tried to grow food in the years that led up to the famine,
> and died, or left. Many towns and villages in affected regions only have a
> quarter the population they had before the famine. Half a century later,
> folklorists discovered Ireland as the last great peasant country in western
> Europe (etc.) and devoted huge effort to collecting its legends, customs
> and folktales. The famine was almost entirely absent from the stories that
> were told. The scale of the trauma overwhelmed the ability to narratise it
> – except occasionally to insist that those who died by the roadside were
> strangers, denying what in a world used to death from poverty was the most
> shameful fact – that the community had not been able to help its own.
>
> Crises are deeply human, but that also means that we experience them *
> *specifically**, not as a generic human experience – though in my
> experience white Americans and English people are particularly prone to
> mistake their own experience for universal ones, and have a media and
> publishing industry that places this fragment of humanity at the centre of
> the story. This same crisis is not being experienced in the same way
> everywhere, and will not be responded to in the same way everywhere.
>
> But when you are selling a story to a commercial audience, “writing your
> coronavirus piece”, the rhetoric demanded by the medium takes over. You
> write for the imagined “we”, you talk about a notionally shared experience,
> you present the hope that is required by the genre in terms of some
> determinism or some magical solution. (Two other variants are to say that
> the virus will provoke a crisis of the established order which must have X
> outcome, or that it shows that we must … do whatever the author already
> thought was a good idea before the virus).
>
> In a sense this is fair enough – readers want to consume a product, and
> something like a Guardian long read is a prescribed form for a given
> audience: the think-y members of its largely Anglophone,
> to-the-left-of-liberal audience, looking to consume a certain kind of
> experience in the ten minutes they give to it. To ask a piece like this to
> propose movement strategy is a bit like asking the same of a TV box set.
>
> But what marks the weakness of much of our movements, I think, is the
> extent to which activists circulate these pieces as though they might offer
> hope to hang on to – as though we are not, in fact, managing to sustain our
> own “intellectual means of production”, but gain pleasure from seeing “one
> of ours” in the Guardian, singing in the right key.
>
> That dependence on other people’s media, and on genres geared to passive
> consumption (there are also theoretical / academic versions, and radical
> publishing ones, and “cookbooks of the future”), frightens me. Our
> continued inability to talk to each other, and to ask “what shall we do,
> together?” is in itself a pretty sure sign that it will be other people,
> and other agendas, that determine what comes next. Writing without agency –
> or with magical agency only – is a secondary effect of this.
>
> Laurence
>
>
>
>
>
> Saturday, April 11, 2020
>
>
>
> Hi Brian…
>
>             Very frankly, the ‘And yet…’ was just a sudden, last-moment
> add-on.  I had been through a long and exhausting day, and was very moved
> by Rebecca’s essay, and wanted to get my reply off to you and the list.
> But there was something nagging - in my mind, in my soul – and so the best
> I could do at that moment was to say this...
>
>             I’ve now had a chance to read her essay again, and am going to
> try and articulate at least some of what I think that nagging feeling was
> about.
>
> In short, I said that because while remaining very beautiful, there’s also
> a certain innocence about her essay, such as in the following passage,
> which worries me :
>
> … When this storm clears, we may, as do people who have survived a serious
> illness or accident, see where we were and where we should go in a new
> light. We may feel free to pursue change in ways that seemed impossible
> while the ice of the status quo was locked up. We may have a profoundly
> different sense of ourselves, our communities, our systems of production
> and our future…
>
> Yes, we might; but there are so any questions here.  First, who is this
> ‘we’ that Rebecca is referring to here, anyway ?  There are so many people
> out there at the moment who are struggling just to be able to survive,
> whose presents and futures have been crushed and destroyed, and who – in
> short - are not (at the moment, and like some of us are) having the luxury
> of enjoying the bluer skies that have appeared, and who are not going to, I
> suspect, be able for a long, long time to enjoy experiencing the clarity of
> vision that she portrays here so movingly….  And so I’m left with the
> feeling that she is really talking to a privileged minority who will
> survive the present epidemic all but untouched, and who have the strength
> and the wherewithal to ‘see’ and to act on that.
>
>             Though there is a point at which she seems to be signalling a
> wider landscape –
>
> “For many of us in the developed world, what has changed most immediately
> is spatial”
>
>  -, for me her essay is also essentially North-centric.  But we aren’t and
> can't all be universal, and so I set this aside.  But I think that what I
> say above is surely true even for the North… and the structural location of
> the ‘we’ that comes across from the following passage is, for me, worrying :
>
> When we are no longer trying to unlink ourselves from the chain of a
> spreading disease, I wonder if we will rethink how we were linked, how we
> moved about and how the goods we rely on moved about. Perhaps we will
> appreciate the value of direct face-to-face contact more. Perhaps the
> Europeans who have sung together from their balconies or applauded together
> for their medical workers, and the Americans who came out to sing or dance
> on their suburban blocks, will have a different sense of belonging. Perhaps
> we will find a new respect for the workers who produce our food and those
> who bring it to our tables.
>
> Can you see what I mean ?
>
> Second, there is also an innocence – that surprises me, frankly, given
> earlier work of hers that I've seen - where she also seems to all but
> ignore the depth to which the virus of capitalism and the project of
> neoliberalism has penetrated ‘us’ / such huge populations of the world, and
> the degree to which ‘we’ have now been programmed to ‘want’ to return to
> what we were doing before (and to just assume / understand / perceive that
> as the *only future that we can move to), to how we were consuming before,
> to how we understand ourselves and the world around us and to ‘enjoy’ it….
> And where huge systems of artificial intelligence are now already in place
> all around us, in every facet of our lives, to penetrate us, and keep a
> watch on us, and ‘help’ us do this.  (And which, sadly, in most parts of
> the world we are surrendering to…)  And so where her doing this – and
> crucially, not talking about it at all - seriously worries me.
>
> And there's also a certain hopeful innocence in her writing about how
> things might unfold, such as in the following :
>
> I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised
> our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the
> withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be
> hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process.
> A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it
> may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that
> sudden and profound change is possible after all.
>
> (‘It is to be hoped…’ ??  Really ?)
>
> For myself, I suspect the ‘we’ who will enjoy this new clarity of vision
> may be a very small minority.  As I see it, there’s nothing inherently
> wrong with speaking to a minority, but she then – I think – needs to look
> beyond that and at the strategic tasks that this privileged minority then
> has before it.  And the gigantic nature of this task, of unprogramming and
> freeing, but without simultaneously struggling, as John Holloway has
> written, to ourselves then wanting to take power-over; which is a freedom
> struggle of a new kind.  As I see it though, this then is very different
> from the landscape that she has painted here.
>
>             (Let me make clear that by using the term ‘minority’, I’m not
> signalling some kind of vanguard necessarily emerging – though this too is
> indeed what might happen, and which we also have to guard against.  I’m
> here referring here just about the minority – most of whom will belong to
> the privileged classes and castes – who will survive and ‘emerge’ well
> enough to be able to do this, relatively unencumbered… )
>
>             None of this is to get away from the haunting beauty of her
> words; but I think – though I almost hate to say this - that we also need
> to not be so entranced by beauty that we lose our critical edge; for
> instance, with regard to this stunning sketch that she does :
>
> There’s another analogy that comes to mind. When a caterpillar enters its
> chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this
> state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor
> the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the
> imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity.
> May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the
> imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup.
>
> But stand back and look at this passage, and reflect on it…. “May the best
> among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells…”
> ??  I know that this is an open statement, and hope, and it’s beautiful in
> that way; but we surely also know how stacked the world is…
>
> Yes, I confess, Brian, I know I am badly afflicted with criticalitis.
> But… what to do ?
>
> Jai
>
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 10, 2020, at 9:16 PM, Brian K. Murphy <brian at radicalroad.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> "And yet?”.  Was not that precisely her point, Jai.  ?
>
>
>
> Brian
>
> On Apr 10, 2020, at 1:07 PM, Jai Sen <jai.sen at cacim.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> Friday, April 10, 2020
>
>
>
> Thanks you for posting this, Brian.  It’s very beautifully written, and
> deeply moving, and meaningful.  And clarifying….
>
>             And yet…
>
>             Jai
>
>
>
> *On Apr 10, 2020, at 11:49 AM, Brian K Murphy <brian at radicalroad.com
> <brian at radicalroad.com>> wrote:*
>
> *~ apologies for cross-postings ~*
>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit
>
> *'The impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us
> about hope  *
>
>  *In the midst of fear and isolation, we are learning that profound,
> positive change is possible. *
>
> Rebecca Solnit <https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rebeccasolnit>Tue 7
> Apr 2020  | |* The Guardian*
>
> Disasters begin suddenly and never really end. The future will not, in
> crucial ways, be anything like the past, even the very recent past of a
> month or two ago. Our economy, our priorities, our perceptions will not be
> what they were at the outset of this year. The particulars are startling:
> companies such as GE and Ford retooling to make ventilators, the scramble
> for protective gear, once-bustling city streets becoming quiet and empty,
> the economy in freefall. Things that were supposed to be unstoppable
> stopped, and things that were supposed to be impossible – extending
> workers’ rights and benefits, freeing prisoners, moving a few trillion
> dollars around in the US – have already happened.
>
> The word “crisis” means, in medical terms, the crossroads a patient
> reaches, the point at which she will either take the road to recovery or to
> death. The word “emergency” comes from “emergence” or “emerge”, as if you
> were ejected from the familiar and urgently need to reorient. The word
> “catastrophe” comes from a root meaning a sudden overturning.
>
> We have reached a crossroads, we have emerged from what we assumed was
> normality, things have suddenly overturned. One of our main tasks now –
> especially those of us who are not sick, are not frontline workers, and are
> not dealing with other economic or housing difficulties – is to understand
> this moment, what it might require of us, and what it might make possible.
>
> A disaster (which originally meant “ill-starred”, or “under a bad star”)
> changes the world and our view of it. Our focus shifts, and what matters
> shifts. What is weak breaks under new pressure, what is strong holds, and
> what was hidden emerges. Change is not only possible, we are swept away by
> it. We ourselves change as our priorities shift, as intensified awareness
> of mortality makes us wake up to our own lives and the preciousness of
> life. Even our definition of “we” might change as we are separated from
> schoolmates or co-workers, sharing this new reality with strangers. Our
> sense of self generally comes from the world around us, and right now, we
> are finding another version of who we are.
>
> As the pandemic upended our lives, people around me worried that they were
> having trouble focusing and being productive. It was, I suspected, because
> we were all doing other, more important work. When you’re recovering from
> an illness, pregnant or young and undergoing a growth spurt, you’re working
> all the time, especially when it appears you’re doing nothing. Your body is
> growing, healing, making, transforming and labouring below the threshold of
> consciousness. As we struggled to learn the science and statistics of this
> terrible scourge, our psyches were doing something equivalent. We were
> adjusting to the profound social and economic changes, studying the lessons
> disasters teach, equipping ourselves for an unanticipated world.
> ------------------------------
>
> The first lesson a disaster teaches is that everything is connected. In
> fact, disasters, I found while living through a medium-sized one (the 1989
> earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area) and later writing about major
> ones (including 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima
> nuclear catastrophe
> <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/24/the-school-beneath-the-wave-the-unimaginable-tragedy-of-japans-tsunami>
> in Japan), are crash courses in those connections. At moments of immense
> change, we see with new clarity the systems – political, economic, social,
> ecological – in which we are immersed as they change around us. We see
> what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s corrupt, what matters and what doesn’t.
>
> I often think of these times as akin to a spring thaw: it’s as if the pack
> ice has broken up, the water starts flowing again and boats can move
> through places they could not during winter. The ice was the arrangement of
> power relations that we call the status quo – it seems to be stable, and
> those who benefit from it often insist that it’s unchangeable. Then it
> changes fast and dramatically, and that can be exhilarating, terrifying, or
> both.
>
> Those who benefit most from the shattered status quo are often more
> focused on preserving or reestablishing it than protecting human life – as
> we saw when a chorus of US conservatives and corporate top dogs insisted
> that, for the sake of the stock market, everyone had to go back to work,
> and that the resultant deaths would be an acceptable price to pay. In a
> crisis, the powerful often try to seize more power – as they have in this
> round, with the Trump Department of Justice looking at suspending
> <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/donald-trump-coronavirus-emergency-powers-abuse>
> constitutional rights – and the rich seek more riches: two Republican
> senators
> <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/20/republican-senators-sold-stocks-before-markets-plunged-on-coronavirus-fears-reports>
> are under fire for allegedly using inside information about the coming
> pandemic to make a profit in the stock market (although both have denied
> wrongdoing).
>
> Disaster scholars use the term “elite panic” to describe the ways that
> elites react when they assume that ordinary people will behave badly. When
> elites describe “panic” and “looting” in the streets, these are usually
> misnomers for ordinary people doing what they need to do to survive or care
> for others. Sometimes it’s wise to move rapidly from danger; sometimes it’s
> altruistic to gather supplies to share.
>
> Such elites often prioritise profit and property over human life and
> community. In the days after a huge earthquake struck San Francisco on 18
> April 1906, the US military swarmed over the city, convinced that ordinary
> people were a threat and a source of disorder. The mayor issued a “shoot to
> kill” proclamation <http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/killproc.html> against
> looters, and the soldiers believed they were restoring order.
>
> What they were actually doing was setting inexpert firebreaks that helped
> fire spread through the city, and shooting or beating citizens who
> disobeyed orders (sometimes those orders were to let the fires burn down
> their own homes and neighbourhoods). Ninety-nine years later, in the
> aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’s police and white vigilantes
> did the same thing: shooting black people
> <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/new-orleans-reaches-settlements-for-police-shootings-after-hurricane-katrina>
> in the name of defending property and their own authority. The local, state
> and federal government insisted on treating a stranded, mostly poor, mostly
> black population as dangerous enemies to be contained and controlled,
> rather than victims of a catastrophe to be aided.
>
> The mainstream media colluded in obsessing about looting in the aftermath
> of Katrina. The stock of mass-manufactured goods in large corporate chain
> stores seemed to matter more than people needing food and clean water, or
> grandmothers left clinging to roofs. Nearly 1,500 people died of a disaster
> that had more to do with bad government than with bad weather. The US Army
> Corps of Engineers’ levees had failed
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/us/decade-after-katrina-pointing-finger-more-firmly-at-army-corps.html>;
> the city had no evacuation plans for the poor, and President George W
> Bush’s administration failed to deliver prompt and effective relief.
>
> The same calculus is happening now. A member of the Brazilian opposition
> said <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/tp-captain-corona> of
> Brazil’s rightwing president Jair Bolsonaro: “He represents the most
> perverse economic interests that couldn’t care less about people’s lives.
> They’re worried about maintaining their profitability.” (Bolsonaro claims
> he is trying to protect workers and the economy.)
>
> The billionaire evangelist who owns the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby
> claimed divine guidance
> <https://www.businessinsider.com/hobby-lobby-reportedly-leaving-stores-open-message-from-god-2020-3>
> in keeping his workers at their jobs when businesses were ordered to close.
> (The company has now closed
> <https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hobby-lobby-closes-stores-defying-coronavirus-stay-home/story?id=69975963>
> all its stores.) At Uline Corporation, owned by billionaire Trump backers
> Richard and Liz Uihlein, a memo sent to Wisconsin workers said: “please do
> NOT tell your peers about the symptoms & your assumptions. By doing so, you
> are causing unnecessary panic in the office.” The billionaire founder and
> chairman of payroll processing corporation Paychex, Tom Golisano, said
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/29/bankers-trump-economy-coronavirus-deaths>:
> “The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than
> losing a few more people.” (Golisano has since said his comments were
> misrepresented, and has apologised.)
>
> Historically, there have always been titans of industry who prized the
> lifeless thing that is profit over living beings, who paid bribes in order
> to operate unhindered, worked children to death or put labourers in mortal
> danger in sweatshops and coal mines. There were also those who pressed on
> with fossil fuel extraction and burning despite what they knew, or refused
> to know, about climate change. One of the primary uses of wealth has always
> been to buy your way out of the common fate, or, at least, it has come with
> a belief that you can disassociate from society at large. And while the
> rich are often conservative, conservatives more often align with the rich,
> whatever their economic status.
>
> The idea that everything is connected is an affront to conservatives who
> cherish a macho every-man-for-himself frontier fantasy. Climate change has
> been a huge insult to them – this science that says what comes out of our
> cars and chimneys shapes the fate of the world in the long run and affects
> crops, sea level, forest fires and so much more. If everything is
> connected, then the consequences of every choice and act and word have to
> be examined, which we see as love in action and they see as impingement
> upon absolute freedom, freedom being another word for absolutely no limits
> on the pursuit of self-interest.
>
> Ultimately, a significant portion of conservatives and corporate leaders
> regard science as an annoyance that they can refuse to recognise. Some
> insist they can choose whatever rules and facts they want, as though these
> too are just free-market commodities to pick and choose from or remake
> according to one’s whims. “This denial of science and critical thinking
> among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the
> coronavirus crisis,” wrote
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/coronavirus-trump-evangelicals.html?fbclid=IwAR1ChJXKIYTvBcrDKcjwU3UJJ6Dj1SeAbA82KPoTvRlYR2IphLKj8qZ_dzQ>
> the journalist Katherine Stewart in the New York Times.
>
> Our rulers showed little willingness to recognise the ominous
> possibilities of the pandemic in the US, the UK, Brazil and many other
> countries. They failed in their most important job, and denying that
> failure will be a major focus for them. And while it may be inevitable that
> the pandemic will result in an economic crash, it is also turning into an
> opportunity for authoritarian power grabs in the Philippines, Hungary,
> Israel and the US – a reminder that the largest problems are still
> political, and so are their solutions.
> ------------------------------
>
> When a storm subsides, the air is washed clean of whatever particulate
> matter has been obscuring the view, and you can often see farther and more
> sharply than at any other time. When this storm clears, we may, as do
> people who have survived a serious illness or accident, see where we were
> and where we should go in a new light. We may feel free to pursue change in
> ways that seemed impossible while the ice of the status quo was locked up.
> We may have a profoundly different sense of ourselves, our communities, our
> systems of production and our future.
>
> For many of us in the developed world, what has changed most immediately
> is spatial. We have stayed home, those of us who have homes, and away from
> contact with others. We have withdrawn from schools, workplaces,
> conferences, vacations, gyms, errands, parties, bars, clubs, churches,
> mosques, synagogues, from the busyness and bustle of everyday life.
>
> The philosopher-mystic Simone Weil once wrote to a faraway friend: “Let us
> love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those
> who do not love each other are not separated.” We have withdrawn from each
> other to protect each other. And people have found ways to help the
> vulnerable, despite the need to remain physically distant.
>
> My friend Renato Redentor Constantino, a climate campaigner, wrote to me
> from the Philippines, and said:
>
> “We are witness today to daily displays of love that remind us of the many
> reasons why humans have survived this long. We encounter epic acts of
> courage and citizenship each day in our neighbourhoods and in other cities
> and countries, instances that whisper to us that the depredations of a few
> will eventually be overcome by legions of stubborn people who refuse the
> counsel of despair, violence, indifference and arrogance that so-called
> leaders appear so eager nowadays to trigger.”
>
> When we are no longer trying to unlink ourselves from the chain of a
> spreading disease, I wonder if we will rethink how we were linked, how we
> moved about and how the goods we rely on moved about. Perhaps we will
> appreciate the value of direct face-to-face contact more. Perhaps the
> Europeans who have sung together from their balconies or applauded together
> for their medical workers, and the Americans who came out to sing or dance
> on their suburban blocks, will have a different sense of belonging. Perhaps
> we will find a new respect for the workers who produce our food and those
> who bring it to our tables.
>
> Although staying put is hard, maybe we will be reluctant to resume our
> rushing about, and something of the stillness now upon us will stay with
> us. We may rethink the wisdom of having much of our most vital stuff –
> medicine, medical equipment – made on other continents. We may also rethink
> the precarious just-in-time supply chains.
>
> I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised
> our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the
> withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be
> hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process.
> A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it
> may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that
> sudden and profound change is possible after all.
>
> “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” Wordsworth wrote
> <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us>,
> a little more than 200 years ago. Perhaps this will be the moment that we
> recognise that there is enough food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and
> education for all – and that access to these things should not depend on
> what job you do and whether you earn enough money.
>
> Perhaps the pandemic is also making the case, for those who were not
> already convinced, for universal healthcare and basic income
> <https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/17/universal-basic-income-ideas-are-part-of-emergency-coronavirus-plan.html>.
> In the aftermath of disaster, a change of consciousness and priorities are
> powerful forces.
>
> A dozen years ago I interviewed the Nicaraguan poet and Sandinista
> revolutionary Giocondo Belli
> <https://www.theguardian.com/profile/giocondabelli> for my book on
> disaster, *A Paradise Built in Hell. *What she told me about the
> aftermath of the 1972 earthquake in Managua – that, despite the
> dictatorship’s crackdown, it helped bring on the revolution – was
> unforgettable. She said:
>
> “You had a sense of what was important. And people realised that what was
> important was freedom and being able to decide your life and agency. Two
> days later you had this tyrant imposing a curfew, imposing martial law. The
> sense of oppression on top of the catastrophe was really unbearable. And
> once you had realised that your life can be decided by one night of the
> Earth deciding to shake, [you thought]: ‘So what? I want to live a good
> life and I want to risk my life, because I can also lose my life in one
> night.’ You realise that life has to be lived well or is not worth living.
> It’s a very profound transformation that takes place during catastrophes.”
>
> I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity
> makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in
> life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society or
> the common good.
> ------------------------------
>
> I have mostly written about 20th-century disasters, but one analogy a bit
> further back comes to mind: the Black Death, which wiped out a third of
> Europe’s population, and, in England, later led to peasant revolts against
> war taxes and wage caps that were officially quashed, but nevertheless led
> to more rights and freedoms for peasants and labourers. In the emergency
> legislation passed in the US in March, many workers gained new sick-leave
> rights. Lots of things we were assured were impossible – housing the
> homeless
> <https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/oakland-hotels-housing-the-homeless-during-coronavirus-pandemic/2264355/>,
> for example – have come to pass in some places.
>
> Ireland nationalised its hospitals, something “we were told would never
> happen and could never happen,” an Irish journalist commented
> <https://twitter.com/newschambers/status/1242518486150197248?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1242518486150197248&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2F2020%2F03%2F26%2Fireland-nationalizes-hospitals-duration-coronavirus>.
> Canada came up with four months of basic income
> <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52022506> for those who lost
> their jobs. Germany did more than that
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/world/europe/coronavirus-Berlin-self-employed.html>.
> Portugal decided to treat immigrants and asylum seekers as full citizens
> <https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/portugal-grants-migrants-and-asylum-seekers-full-citizenship-rights-during-covid-19/>
> during the pandemic. In the US, we have seen powerful labour agitation, and
> results. Workers at Whole Foods, Instacart and Amazon have protested at
> being forced to work in unsafe conditions during the pandemic. (Whole Foods
> has since offered workers who test positive two weeks off on full pay;
> Instacart says it has made changes to safeguard workers and shoppers, while
> Amazon said it is “following guidelines” on safety.) Some workers have
> gained new rights and raises, including almost half a million Kroger
> <https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/kroger-grocery-worker-in-texas-receive-pay-raises-new-benefits-during-coronavirus-outbreak/2343540/>
> grocery store workers, while 15 state attorneys-general told Amazon
> <https://www.cnet.com/news/state-ags-tell-amazon-to-boost-paid-sick-leave-during-coronavirus-crisis/>
> to expand its paid sick leave. These specifics make clear how possible it
> is to change the financial arrangements of all our societies.
>
> But often the most significant consequences of disasters are not immediate
> or direct.
>
> The 2008 financial collapse led to 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising,
> which prompted a new reckoning with economic inequality and a new scrutiny
> of the human impact of exploitative mortgages, student loans, for
> profit-colleges, health-insurance systems and more, and that in turn
> amplified the profiles of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, whose ideas
> have helped pull the Democratic party to the left, towards policies that
> will make the US fairer and more equal. The conversations stirred by Occupy
> and its sister movements across the globe incited more critical scrutiny of
> ruling powers, and more demands for economic justice. Changes in the public
> sphere originate within the individual, but also, changes in the world at
> large affect our sense of self, our priorities and our sense of the
> possible.
>
> We are only in the early stages of this disaster, and we are also in a
> strange stillness. It is like the Christmas truce of 1914, when German and
> English soldiers stopped fighting for a day, the guns fell silent and
> soldiers mingled freely. War itself paused.
>
> There’s a way that our getting and spending has been a kind of war against
> the Earth. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, carbon emissions have plummeted
> <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/23/coronavirus-pandemic-leading-to-huge-drop-in-air-pollution>.
> Reports say the air above Los Angeles, Beijing and New Delhi is
> miraculously clean. Parks all over the US are shut to visitors, which may
> have a beneficial effect on wildlife. In the last government shutdown of
> 2018-2019, elephant seals at Point Reyes National Seashore just north of
> San Francisco took over a new beach
> <https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-elephant-seals-point-reyes-20190523-story.html>,
> and now own it for the duration of their season of mating and birthing on
> land.
> ------------------------------
>
> There’s another analogy that comes to mind. When a caterpillar enters its
> chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this
> state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor
> the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the
> imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity.
> May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the
> imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is
> not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that
> were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both
> the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of
> profound change.
>
> But this is also a time of depth for those spending more time at home and
> more time alone, looking outward at this unanticipated world. We often
> divide emotions into good and bad, happy and sad, but I think they can
> equally be divided into shallow and deep, and the pursuit of what is
> supposed to be happiness is often a flight from depth, from one’s own
> interior life and the suffering around us – and not being happy is often
> framed as a failure.
>
> But there is meaning as well as pain in sadness, mourning and grief, the
> emotions born of empathy and solidarity. If you are sad and frightened, it
> is a sign that you care, that you are connected in spirit. If you are
> overwhelmed – well, it is overwhelming, and it will take decades of study,
> analysis, discussion and contemplation to understand how and why 2020
> suddenly took us all into marshy new territory.
>
> Seven years ago, Patrisse Cullors wrote a sort of mission statement for
> Black Lives Matter:
>
> “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective
> power to achieve collective transformation. Rooted in grief and rage but
> pointed towards vision and dreams.”
>
> It is beautiful not only because it is hopeful, not only because then
> Black Lives Matter set out and did transformative work, but because it
> acknowledges that hope can coexist with difficulty and suffering. The
> sadness in the depths and the fury that burns above are not incompatible
> with hope, because we are complex creatures, because hope is not optimism
> that everything will be fine regardless.
>
> Hope offers us clarity that, amid the uncertainty ahead, there will be
> conflicts worth joining and the possibility of winning some of them. And
> one of the things most dangerous to this hope is the lapse into believing
> that everything was fine before disaster struck, and that all we need to do
> is return to things as they were.
>
> Ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation
> and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate
> catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality. It is too soon to know what will
> emerge from this emergency, but not too soon to start looking for chances
> to help decide it. It is, I believe, what many of us are preparing to do.
>
> ________________________________________
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