There’s been something niggling at me around the coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. I’ve been struggling to put my finger on it but it’s finally dawned on me. (Yes, I know, you all knew this weeks ago. What can I say, when I was made I saw the queues for brains or looks and dived down the rubbish chute! 😁)
Politicians – especially the right wing ones, and particularly President Trump (Impeached) and PM Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson (2x fired for lying) – are going all out to portray this global health crisis as a war. True, we use phrases like “lost the battle” when someone dies of an accident or illness, but how much of the language they’re using is metaphorical and how much is spin?
Consider this. The Baby Boomers were raised by parents who had been through the biggest war in history. They were brought up on the rose tinted stories of heroism, derring-do and make do and mend. Sacrifice and community spirit. With no global challenge to face they grew up with a very self-centered view of the world.
They were the children who’s futures their parents fought for. They deserved all of the benefits their parents built. In the UK this included the NHS, welfare state and a strengthening economy. Free Higher Education, Grammar Schools, education grants, disability benefits. All of these things helped to build an entitled generation who believed that the world revolved around them.
These are the people who are in power now. But their numbers are starting to dwindle. As they get older and retire, their grip on the reigns becomes weaker. And they can feel it. They can see it. A world that doesn’t revolve around them. So they try to build the sense of shared experiences with those people who are younger in the same way that they experienced it.
War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Sugar. Everything becomes a war,with an enemy to stand together against. But it doesn’t work like that. What do these wars have in common? They’re still going strong, Drugs, Terrorism, sugar – still the bad guys, still “fighting” them.
Now let’s look at some of the problems which Gen-X grew into. Globalisation, the hole in the ozone layer, equal LGBTQIA+ rights. They didn’t declare war on multinationals, CFCs, homophobes. They were instrumental in the creation of the Internet as we know it, they boycotted CFC aerosols and bought CFC free fridges. They marched and wrote to their MPs, they came out and they were proud.
We’ve by no means solved the problems raised by globalism, the hole in the ozone layer turned out to be just an indication of how much we’d screwed the planet and equality is coming slowly but surely. But we didn’t need the language of war to build a movement, and I think that it causes more harm than good.
In a war you have “acceptable losses” and “collateral damage”. People die, that’s one of the whole points about war, one of the reasons why democracies debate going to war. How many of us are likely to die in war? How many people will survive? Can we justify the maths? A war is waged by people who are trained to fight.
This isn’t a war. This is about care, compassion, healing. The questions asked in an epidemic or pandemic are completely different. We don’t ask about acceptable losses, we ask how many people we can save. We don’t try to develop more destructive weapons, we find ways to help more people.
Ask our doctors, our nurses, our care workers, how many deaths are too many? I have a feeling that they won’t have a number that they’ll consider “acceptable losses”. Every life lost, every number that Matt Hancock, Dominic Raab, Michael Gove or Priti Patel have read out from the podium in bland, emotionless tones, is a reminder that this was preventable.
We don’t need a war. We don’t need another Churchill. (Which is a good job since de Pfeffel Johnson is in no way a Churchillian leader.) We need medics, carers, people who can empathise and make tough decisions to keep us safe. We need a leader who is parental. Firm, kind, caring.
So, in lieu of that sort of leader, we need to parent ourselves. And the country has stepped up in an amazing way. From the food shopping that people are doing to help the elderly and vulnerable, to the posties dressing up to do their rounds. The school children making PPE visors to the older people making home made face masks. Where the government is failing, society is stepping up.
But there’s only so much that society can do, eventually the government will need to step up, take responsibility for its actions and inaction, and lead the country’s response. Not as a war to be won. But as a medical emergency with thousands of lives that need to be saved.
.
As we come to the second anniversary of this blog I thought that it was time to update the site. So we have a brighter look and there’s a few widgets down at the bottom of the page. (I’m going to have to work those out soon!)
Proud Ankylosaur 