Covid 19

Q is for Quality of Life…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

The current crisis has changed the lives of almost every person in the whole world and the following are fictional responses, imagining those changes (albeit with some research) and especially changes, for better or worse, to the quality of life…


Susan, Sex Worker

My working name is Susan and I am a sex worker according to my key worker, a prostitute if you are the pigs, a tart if you are a punter, and I am a drug addict. I got to do heroin because I can’t face working the streets without it and I work the streets because I need to buy heroin. Dealers know this and use it against me and the other girls, they let us have the first score of the night for free but then we have to pay back double plus the next score so we are playing catch up all bloody night. Then when we are ready to finish, they give us some bad shit that makes us feel so ill we need to work again for one more score – bastards.

But things are different now – what with the virus. The week before lockdown, the dealers were selling cheap – afraid they wouldn’t shift their gear – that meant we had an easier week. But when lockdown began the police were all over us girls on the street and we couldn’t go out without risking being locked up properly overnight – not good when you’re dying for a hit. The dealers wouldn’t come out either ‘cos the police were everywhere and stopping cars all the time. Then there was the boyfriend – pimp some would call him, since he was always pushing me out the door to work and score for both of us. After two days without drugs he chipped – not without givin’ me a black eye first – I think he went back to stay at his bro’s so I don’t have to fight with him no more – good riddance!

I can go to the pharmacy in town each day for my methadone but for a few days I was starving for food. I thought about it and then I rang George. George is a punter who I used to visit at home and he is 65 and he give me a home for now and food. Of course we do the business but now I am there all the time, he don’t want too much. Maybe once a week was enuff anyway – I think he is more glad of the company – he can’t go to the pub no more and I don’t mind him neither, an’ he has loads of books which I like. I do the shopping for us – I go out each day for the methadone which I often used to throw up ‘cos I’m bulimic but my life is less stressful than for as long as I can remember so I mostly keep it down.

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 1
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 7 

Freddie, 6 year-old boy

My brother and I live in Stevenage, which is in Hertfordshire, with our parents and during the week, our nanny. Daddy does something with money – I don’t really understand and Mummy is a lawyer but I don’t really understand what that is either. They have explained but I can’t tell them I don’t understand ‘cos then they’ll think I am stupid and they are very strict about being clever at school. Usually, we go to school in the week and our nanny – she is called Jane, she takes us and picks us up and stays with us till Mummy comes home. Jane lets us sing on the way home but we are not allowed to sing at home. We made Rainbow paintings on our last day at school, but we got into trouble because we drew a rainbow on the driveway with chalk, like we saw other children do on the TV. Mummy made us wash it off and Jane and Mummy argued. Jane is fun and now she is teaching us at home because we can’t go to school because of the virus and although Mummy and Daddy are home all the time – they are still working and we mustn’t disturb them. I miss going to school and seeing my friends. We still get to sing when Jane takes us out for exercise – everybody is allowed to go out to exercise for one hour a day. This is the best bit of the day!

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 7
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 6

James 85 year-old in a Residential Home

I am afraid for my life – more even than during the Blitz. My parents wouldn’t let my sister and I be evacuated as we lived just outside London on the hill above Greenwich and when we came out of our shelter after the all-clear, we could see London burning and once a bomber crashed in the High Street but never was I as afraid as I am now. Last year I had a leg amputated which is why I am in here but I was doing okay till this Covid 19 thing. I needed help going to the toilet and in the shower but the staff at this home were kind and brilliant. Now though, they are doing the best they can but still, 12 people in the home have died of the virus and the staff haven’t got all the equipment they need to keep themselves safe or therefore me. I try to call on them as little as possible but sometimes I have to. I know they always liked to help me before because I don’t have dementia, like lots of the residents, and they could have a proper conversation with me – but now they are stressed and afraid both for themselves and for me. I watch the television and I understand what is going on, I may be 85 but I’m not stupid, and it’s obvious that everyone in residential homes has been abandoned – they are not even counting the deaths in homes – only those who die in hospital. The government says that that is how all countries are measuring the course of the disease but it feels like we just don’t count any which way…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 8
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 2

Glen, 10 year-old boy.

We had to sleep on the street last night because Mum can’t work and the landlord threw us out of our flat – Mum told him the government said he wasn’t allowed to but he told her to fuck off and he nearly hit her. Today we went to a hostel and we have got a place to sleep tonight but it’s horrible and we are not allowed to be there till this evening. We sat in the town centre but the police wouldn’t listen to mum when she said we were homeless and told us to move somewhere else. So we are now sitting by the river where there are no police but people keep giving us funny looks ‘cos of all the bags we have with us. I’m hungry…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 5
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 1

George, 65 year-old

I have been furloughed because of my age and my partner Jane’s age and our health. I am pre-diabetic and she has COPD so we are especially vulnerable to Covid 19. My job is such that there is nothing I can do to work from home and I am unlikely to get paid again till this is over though, and for people our age, self-isolation could go on a long time. In the old days, at 65, I would have been receiving my state pension but now I have to wait until next March. We are saving a lot of money, no commuting costs, no going out costs at weekends (I only worked four days a week anyway so we had long weekends) and we are eating less. Even things we might like to buy, like plants for the allotment we started last year, we cannot, because garden centres are closed. Still, we are lucky, we did equity release recently so we won’t run out of money, whatever happens. Our daughter and grandson do the shopping for us each week which I miss because I like to cook and I like to do the food shopping. Jane likes to shop for clothes – she even bought me some new trousers online because I needed some – at least you can still get some things that way…
We thought it would be really difficult spending all our time together instead of three days and evenings, but it is like both of us are retired now, not just Jane who was already retired and we have proper togetherness most of the time and the time seems to fly by – so much so that it would be hard to keep track of the days if we weren’ keeping a diary. Of course, we have our moments, such as when I spend too much time blogging and not enough talking together, or we just get a bit fed up at the things we miss doing and the people we can’t see. But on the whole, we know we are lucky to be alive and to have each other and our health – fingers crossed…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 7
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 8

O is for Oxford

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


Oxford – The Bridge of Sighs


Oxford is my city of birth and this photograph is from my last visit in 2017 to meet up with school friends. Due to the wonders of the internet, we have been connected by a Yahoo group for over twenty-five years. We used to meet up in Oxford and play the current boys at cricket, but now the youngest of us is 65, that doesn’t quite work! We should have been meeting up again this month but Covid 19 has put paid to that. So this photograph is a reminder of the last time but also of growing up in the iconic city. There is something special about growing up in a place that so many people visit, recognize, attend university at – it is yours but it is everybody’s…
Although this is called the Bridge of Sighs due to a resemblance to the bridge of that name in Venice, it actually bears a closer resemblance to the Rialto Bridge – also in Venice. It is part of Hertford College.

N is for Neo-Liberalism…

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


What the heck is neo-Liberalism and why should I worry about it?

Don’t worry – it’s not so long ago that I had to look it up because I had seen it mentioned in so many articles as if it was a given that everyone understood. Sadly it is not and the people who espouse it do not want you to know about it, because it is not a good thing!

You can find a full definition of neo-liberalism here but in a nutshell – it is a revival of 19th-century ideas about free-market economics – that allows the market to determine economics – government should not interfere – in fact, the government should de-regulate wherever possible as regulations just get in the way of productivity. This is sometimes called laissez-faire capitalism.

De-regulation

Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan (or more probably his advisors) became taken with the works of Friedrich Hayek on neo-liberal policy and it has dominated British and US not to mention European and many other countries’ politics ever since. I say politics rather than policies because neo-liberalism is a favourite of the right-leaning political parties – for which you can read – “supporters of the rich”.  Even New Labour under Tony Blair went so far as to embrace it, because superficially, it doesn’t sound unreasonable. Look at the butter mountain of Europe – a result of governmental interference in the form of agricultural subsidies. Let the market sort out the price and if farmers can’t get the price they need for butter – let them grow what the market says it really needs instead. Who in their right mind wants unnecessary paperwork due to overbearing bureaucratic governance? Ditch those pesky regulations!

However! It is the de-regulation of banking – allowing banks to have both a lending branch and an investment (gambling on an unimaginable scale) branch with only their own promise that they would keep the two halves separate. Another story, but that is what led to the financial crisis of 2008. De-regulation in neo-liberal terms means removing all the regulations that restrict how the rich can get richer – pesky things like worker’s rights, health & safety, environmental protection – can you see where this is leading? Well for Britain it led to Brexit, softened up by stories penned by our now Prime Minister, about the EU calling for Straight Bananas (a complete fiction), the Europhobes who hate all those great areas of regulation which have built up in the EU, sold Brexit to the public on the strength of “taking back control”. The only people taking more control as a result of Brexit, are the rich supporting right.

Austerity

The greatest tool in the arsenal of neo-liberals which they tell us is for our own good but which is really another self-serving ruse of the rich, is Austerity. Who would not agree that being in debt is a bad thing and that the answer to debt is to tighten your belt and spend less? This might work for an individual, but it does not work in the same way for businesses or nation-states. When a government borrows money to spend on an infrastructural project such as a new motorway, a lot of that money comes back straight away in the form of tax from companies and workers and in the long run, the project creates greater productivity for the country and that allows the debt to be repaid. But this is against the neo-liberal agenda – it is tantamount to interference in the market by the government. If a motorway is really needed,  the market will spot the opening and a consortium will be formed to construct it. Austerity decrees that we save money by cutting spending so the funding to local government is cut forcing them first to become more efficient and then to cut anything which is not absolutely essential. Collecting waste is essential, support for drug or alcohol dependence is not so facilities for them are closed. In the short term, this does not create problems except for individuals, but the long term impact on health services and broken families and damage to the next generation and cyclical problems – you get the picture – costly…
Then there is the stealthy theft of the NHS – it goes like this – first you starve it of cash till it creaks at the seams, then you sell the parts that can make money for private companies (market forces right!) to your rich mates. Result – the underfunded NHS was totally unequal to the task of fighting Covid 19 as it is well into the starvation phase.

The great choice

One of the great lies of Austerity has been exposed by the Covid 19 Crisis. Tories derided Labour plans for increased spending on social welfare and infrastructural development. “There is no Magic Money Tree” they said. Now they are proposing borrowing our way out of the crisis at levels not seen since the Second World War. They are doing some complicated shenanigans with the Bank of England which, however, they deny it, amount to MonetaryFinancing which amounts to a magic money tree. Most people in the Tory party would like to see a return to the good old days of neo-liberal free-for-all which in the wake of Brexit, offers rich pickings for those who have plenty of money already (money comes to money). There has never been a time more urgently requiring the very opposite. Austerity was wrong before the crisis and it will be worse still afterward. We must not be persuaded that the only way to pay off the debt incurred is to tighten our belts for generations to come.

What are the alternatives?
An organization called Sovereign Money has detailed the problems that led to the 2008 financial crisis and what they propose by way of a solution remains valid in the recovery after Cocid 19 – if not more so. They say that there are two sources of money in the economy – money created by banks when they lend money – and money created by the Bank of England on behalf of the government which up to now has been a tiny proportion. Because austerity led governments believe consumer spending is the way forward, they have been happy to see banks lend to individuals which has led to repeated housing price rises (bubbles). At the same time, the banks have not lent freely to businesses – the real economy.

Now that the virus has shut many businesses down and locked-down debt-ridden individuals in enforced unemployment, more of the same must not be an option. The government must use its power to create money via the banks and must return to the real purpose of governance which is to take meaningful decisions about the post-virus world.

You can find much more detail at Sovereign Money – I have only offered a signpost but I urge everyone to quaint themselves with the issues and not allow us to be marched blindly into the same old problems that suit a small minority of the already rich.

M is for Money…

humanist55

This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Where is the money going to come from to get started again?

Individuals, businesses and governments are all moving from the “How can we possibly afford to stop working?” to “How can we possibly afford to start working again?”. Here in the UK, at the daily Press Briefing given by the representatives of government flanked by special health advisors, the awkward questions asked by the press are now including, amongst those on the competency of the UK government to manage the amount of testing required and the supply of personal protection equipment, new and urgent questions on how the government may be starting to envisage how we will restart the economy. There Is some suggestion that the government does not trust us with transparency in this matter for fear we will think its all over and rush back to normal life too soon. Or perhaps they just haven’t got a clue yet…

Largest amongst the issues to be faced is the question of where the money is going to come from and although I am writing from a UK perspective, many of the points will apply across the world. Before I begin, I know I am a day in late posting this challenge piece but in my defense, I only found out about this on the first day of it – those at A to Z 2020 Challenge HQ recently asked the question “Are you a pre-planner or a ‘pantser’?” Necessarily this year I am a seat of the pants writer which at least means that I can react to current circumstances and indeed make them my theme for the challenge. The subject of Money and how we shall find enough to exit the crisis is a big one and needed a lot of research – I have tried to boil it down but there will be links to articles if you want to go deeper.

War Debt

Many governments and others are referring to the struggle to contain Covid 19 as a “War” because it helps to conjure the spirit that is needed from everyone to “defeat” the tiny, invisible, senseless thing which is a virus. Economists are now starting to talk about the cost of the crisis to our economies, in terms of productivity lost, unemployment created and of course the borrowing which will be necessary to get things started, so my question is, if all the countries in the world are facing the same situation, then who is going to lend money to who in order to fix things.

One precedent is what has happened in actual wars – the World Wars for example. Britain had to borrow a lot of money, mainly from the US or in the case of the Second World War, the US and in a smaller amount, Canada. In 1945 alone, the UK borrowed 4.33 billion dollars and 1.93 billion dollars from Canada the following year. Suffice to say that the total repaid amounted to twice that which was lent and the final repayment was as recent as 2006. We may have a “special relationship” with America, but it does not come cheap. Furthermore, that war helped cement the Dollar as the world’s leading currency and saw US influence consolidated around the world – facts which are still pertinent in the crisis of today. Whilst Britain floundered under the weight of debt and the need to rebuild its shattered economy after the war, America, increasingly obsessed with fighting the spread of Communism, made satellites of the “frontline” countries using the Marshall Plan to rebuild European countries equally shattered economies in exchange for hosting military bases.

There is another way of raising money to fight wars which may become significant in solving our present crisis, the issuing of the enchantingly titled “Gilt Edged Security Bonds” – so-called because the certificates have a gilt edge to them. This is a way of borrowing money from private investors, individuals, pension companies and the like. Invented by the British as early as 1694 when King William III borrowed 1.2 million to fund a war with France, gilts are low yielding in terms of interest paid but they are very safe hence their attraction to pension funds. King William could not raise the money for his war from taxes and neither will governments following the Covid 19 crisis since the money they will be dispersing to help businesses and individuals, needs to be spent on producing and consuming, there would be no point in just taking it back as tax. There is a really good chart of all the ways governments can raise money here, at Positive Money – an organization for monetary reform – more of them later.

What do we know about the UK Exit Strategy?

The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Riki Sunak unveiled a plan for £330 Billion which he described as an intervention in the economy “on a scale unimaginable a few weeks ago”. This is indeed true since the Tory party have predicated their policies on Austerity, beating up the Labour Party for years for their level of the national debt – before running up even higher levels themselves (which they predictably kept quiet about). Austerity is the central plank of neo-Liberalism which will be the subject of my next post – a sort of part II to this one. But meantime, the £330bn is actually government-backed loans – however, the loans will actually be issued by the banks. If the loans are defaulted on, the government will, then, and only then, have to shell out – so not quite as magnanimous as it first appears. There will be further offers of support from the government and some will require the government to borrow, either from the markets or by issuing gilts and of course, the Bank of England can always print money, “quantitative easing”, as they did after the 2008 financial crisis.

The Big Choice

The scale of the current crisis in financial terms makes the 2008 financial crisis look small by comparison – we are talking levels of borrowing nearer to that of the war, and our government(s) might be tempted to assert that all this has undone the savings from years of austerity and that we must tighten our belts once again, for the long haul. This is not the only choice and so tomorrow I will look at why austerity is an ideological position and what other choices there are…

L is for Love…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Love is in the air
For young lovers in lockdown
While lost loves
Dream of love locked up
Not locked down.

Love is the drug
That takes you to a different place
Consumes you from within
Tricking your cells
To accept false flags
Before breaking your heart.

It’s a thin line between love and hate
Love the time we have
Hate the loss of freedom
Saving money because we can’t spend it
Losing money because we can’t earn it.

I hope that I don’t fall in love
Let me be a survivor
Don’t wanna be a deep-sea diver
Or win a million fivers
Just let me live and love a little longer.

The one who loves you
Hides in plain sight 
You never gonna feel its bite
Covid 19 –
Who loves ya baby…

——————————————————————

Love is in the air
John Paul Young

Love is the drug
Roxy Music

It’s a thin line between love and hate
Annie Lennox

I hope that I don’t fall in love
Juliet Turner

The one who loves you
The Divine Comedy

K is for Karma…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


Karma – (in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.

There are many people who think, and many more who are wondering, whether the Covid 19 crisis is Karma for the human race, whether the fate of our present state and future existence has been determined by our heretofore actions in regard to the way we live in and treat this world. The definition at the top of the page (courtesy of Wikipedia), uses the word deciding in relation to future existences, and it is, of course, referring to the lives, deaths and reincarnations of individuals. You may have noticed that in connection with the collective fate of the human race, I have used the words “determined by”. The religious use of Karma implies that some divinity weighs the action ( for which karma is the Sanskrit word) of a person’s life and as we say in the west – “As you sow, so shall you reap!”

Does Karma always work?

It is clear in life, that neither the good nor the bad always get their just desserts, and whether anyone becomes demoted to a lower animal in the next life, or the opposite, nobody in this life can actually say. Most religions use the threat of some kind, karmic judgment or heaven v. hell, to try to cajole their congregations into behaving better and without intending to be too cynical, the odd natural disaster, especially ones that have a leveling effect on society, does not go amiss in helping religion in its quest. Ironic then that in this present crisis, those western religions at least – I can’t speak for others – who have been languishing with ever diminishing congregations, have had to lock their doors due to social isolating and are unable to offer comfort in the hour of need – at least not in person. They are asking themselves whether their role is going to be even more diminished once this crisis is over, and with many of the elderly members who have remained staunch attendees having “gone to meet their maker” according to their beliefs, churches are asking themselves how they can reinvent themselves now, in new and perhaps digital ways.

Mind you, there have been some religious people who have brandished their belief in God/Yahweh/Allah as a shield which they are sure will protect them – bible belt evangelists going about their business and their worship as usual, Moslems queuing up to lick shrines and as to Yaakov Litzman, Health Minister for Israel, well he said “all LGBT+ people are sinners” (in other words, the virus is a judgment on them) but has since tested positive for Covid-19, his wife has also tested positive for the disease and, being a cabinet minister, he has caused Benjamin Netenyahu and several top government officials to go into quarantine. All those other virus defying groups will probably also learn the error in their thinking.

Free Will and Karma

Lest you think I am wantonly attacking religion, let me tell you an old joke. A flood was building and as the waters rose around the church, a parishioner ran in to the priest and begged him to come away to higher ground. “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!” The waters surrounded the church and a boat was sent to collect the priest but he said: “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!” As the waters rose the priest climbed up to the roof and a helicopter came to rescue the priest but still he said: “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!”. During the night, the waters washed the priest off the roof and he drowned. Standing before St. Peter at the gates of heaven, the priest asked: “Why did God not save me?” At which, God, who hears everything, rushed up fuming. “What do you mean not save you, you idiot?” God shouted, “I sent a man, a boat and a helicopter to save you!”

The moral of this story is that even for those who believe in God, he has given free will so that you may act well or badly (otherwise there would be no point in judgment) and that means you have to act well and wisely and not expect God to save you from folly of your own making.


The Rationalist’s position…

I don’t believe in God, but I very much believe in free will and folly of our own making, in people who act well and those who act badly and I believe (see C is for Covid 19) that microscopic viruses which are arguably not even alive, have no intelligence and certainly no moral judgment against any of their victims. The very fact and mystery of their pointless existence could be enough to cause a man of faith to question his beliefs…

So can Rationalists, Materialists, Atheists, can they have any truck with the concept of Karma? Very much so – “As you sow, so shall you reap!” is simply cause and effect you can’t get much more “scientific” than that! If you mess up your planet by unrestrained growth, wanton use and waste of resources, unrestrained pollution, you will find yourself in the shit. If you sell live, wild animals that have been infected by disease-carrying bats in a world that is crisscrossed with the airways of the global village, you will get crossover virus events that sooner or later will become pandemics. No moral judgment involved, no Gaia is punishing us with a restorative crisis – just scientifically explainable inevitability!

That is, however, Karma, the consequences of actions chosen – “As you sow, so shall you reap!” So as I have said before in these pages, as we grope towards exit strategies form this crisis – there are past actions to be reassessed, choices to be made,, new ways to be formulated…

J is for Judgment

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

An open letter to Boris Johnson


Dear Prime Minister Johnson

or may I call you Boris since you are now to be perceived as one of the people,” in it together”? I wish you well on your recovery from Covid 19 and I despise those who have made political capital out of your illness and I wish you no harm as a fellow human being.

Whilst I disagree strongly with decades if not centuries of the policies of your party, I know you are not responsible for all that, but you have willingly picked up the mantle. On a personal level, l am given to understand that your position on Brexit had more to do with seeking the highest office in politics rather than conviction and now you have achieved it. Your personal approval ratings are high as the jolly man who promises to “Get Brexit Done!” But this pandemic means that all bets are off, Brexit almost irrelevant for now except that the benefits of international co-operation have never been more needed or more obvious. Furthermore, now that you have experienced the very best treatment by a National Health Service which your party has done so much to wear down under your plans – to change it into an American for-profit system – I hope you have seen the results of those policies, understaffed, under-resourced, yet offering heroic service to the nation in the present crisis.

I hope when you return to work after the rest which your father has prescribed for you, that you’ll see things in a different light – you may question the wisdom of your earlier judgments. I know you will be surrounded by a cabinet full of the people who still believe in austerity as the default position, the same people who pressured this country into Brexit and they will not be happy to see you turn your ideas around but I beg you to do so for it is not possible for this country or indeed the world to return to things as they were. Do you endorse your stand-in having said, whilst you were ill, that “this is not the time to be thinking of a raise in salaries for nurses.” Surely you of all people must now agree that there can be no better time…

You may wish to emulate the man I understand to be your hero – Winston Churchill – a man who made many errors of judgment in his career before finding his ultimate role as leader of the country in a time of war, much as you are now, However, remember, despite having led us through the war successfully, Churchill was disappointed to lose the election in a landslide to Labour after the war, because the people knew by then, that they were entitled something better and they rejected those who traditionally felt entitled. This is how the Welfare State was born and the time has come for the government to renew the Social Contract and rebuild the Welfare State for the people, or as Labour would have it “For the Many Not the Few”. After your election victory you realized you had to look after the so-called Labour red wall seats or else you might lose at the next election. None of us could have foreseen that this crisis would spring up so quickly on your watch, but here it is – your Churchill moment. How are you going to play it? You have the chance to be an outstanding leader if you dare to take a radical position as the times call for. Or you can just attempt to restore things as they were with the massive gaps between rich and poor. But will you then succeed at the next election with an electorate who have had unlimited time to understand and consider how we got to this place in such a poor state of preparedness and to watch how you manage to deal with the crisis.

Please! Go for blue-sky thinking, out-of-the-box thinking, make judgments based on new criteria, try something different – make no mistake that is what is required in what will be a new world order.

PS Your senior advisor – the self-styled Disruptor, Dominic Cummings – is he the right man for the job now. Breaking things is so much easier than trying to fix them and Covid 19 has surely given him as much disruption as even he could wish for -just saying…

H is for Happiness

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Happiness is a Warm Gun…Momma

This song penned by John Lennon is full of double-entendres. Lennon explained that he got the title from an article in a National Rifle Association magazine and he divided the song into three sections, “the Dirty Old Man”, “the Junkie”, and “the Gunman (Satire of ’50s R&R)”. By the last, he meant his sexual desire for Yoko Ono. That there are those for whom a literal warm gun is happiness, that some apparently find happiness in drugs whilst sexual love is yet another form of happiness shows what a complex thing is our “pursuit of Happiness”.

Getty Stock Images


Can we be happy all the time?

In the practice of Zen (and bearing in mind that those who know don’t say and those who say don’t know) it is said that there is constant attention to carrying out the simplest task of living with perfection. Does this bring happiness? It doesn’t sound full of highs nor lows and most people believe that without the lows, we cannot have the highs of happiness. If this present crisis is doing anything positive for us, it is to give us the chance of reflecting on what makes us happy, either because we are deprived of it, thinks lovers separated by social isolation, or because we are with the source of our happiness – oh to be young and in love and in lockdown – would you ever leave your bed! And no, its not just the young who are happy to be locked down with the one they love…
In nine months time, there is likely to be a baby boom whilst it is from the post-war baby boom that many of the victims of Covid  19 are drawn. Whilst this will undeniably reduce some of the future costs to health services for whom the preponderance of older patients, living longer with increasingly solvable but expensive conditions, it will give civil servants no happiness any more than the loss of migrants and the very poor who are also more susceptible to the disease will give no happiness except perhaps, to the vilest of right-wing politicians.
Meanwhile, we take our happiness in lockdown as we may…

Is Happiness an Instinct?

A friend of mine once told me how, during a search for a friend who it was thought, had drowned himself in a local lake, she went in a rowing boat with her lover, and after a time, they wordlessly pulled into the shore and made love. She described it as somehow instinctual, driven, and it puzzled her that in the midst of sorrow and dread, that this should have been their reaction. Many young women gave themselves to young men about to depart for the fighting during the Second World War (perhaps all wars) and if there was a moment of happiness for each of them, did it result in a happy event nine months later. (Imagine the psychologists trying to devise an experiment to test that hypothesis!) Happiness can be mixed with poignant sadness if the father never made it back or perhaps was not even known – so maybe the urge to procreate in the face of disaster is an instinct rather than the pursuit of momentary happiness. If we are driven by instinct, then where does happiness fit in? We human beings need to stay together for perhaps 21 years in order to raise a family, so the joys of sex are but rarely resultant in pregnancy but can form the glue that holds couples together – if they are lucky, and that is why it is not just the young, who may be enjoying the lockdown in their empty nests.


Do animals feel happiness?

It’s so hard not to be anthropocentric when looking at animals, to see the dog with its head on its master’s lap, to watch seagulls shooting the breeze or lambs leaping as they are in the fields here, and not imagine they feel happy – who knows. When I watch lambs playing, I simultaneously feel happy for the moment and sad because I know that very soon they will no longer be frisky but head down grazing for the rest of their lives with no great appearance of happiness ever again…

So there are my thoughts for the day – gather ye rosebuds in whatever ways you can at this sad/happy time. Listen to the bird-song without the roar of traffic, bask under skies not crisscrossed with con-trails, breath deep in the less polluted air, love the one(s) you’re with, practice Zen or whatever floats your boat (within the confines of the lockdown) and if you haven’t got a boat, your mind can imagine whatever you like and you can be happy with it… 

What has made me happy? Last night I took my new telescope outside for the first time and looked at the moon, large and even though slightly hazy, pure magic and wonder!

F is for Fighting…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Fighting a war, fist fighting, fighting for your rights, fighting off an attacker, fighting the good fight, fighting for peace, fighting off an infection, fighting boredom, fighting flab, fighting sleep, fighting insomnia, depression, a sense of failure, fighting old age, fighting for recognition, justice, fighting to be heard, fighting an election, fighting the war on drugs, fighting terrorism, fighting for the environment, fighting for survival, the uses of the word fighting are legion but in this list, and I am sure you can think of more examples, only the first four are literal fights – the rest are metaphorical. When one activity carries such a plethora of metaphors, it must surely say something about our humanity.


It’s not exclusively a human trait to fight, animals do it to win a mate or in defense of territory and in many cases it may not even come to blows – elaborate posturing, special apparatus designed to impress may do the trick although in other cases real and sometimes mortal damage is inflicted. These are legitimate causes for fighting – reproduction and territory are about survival – short and long term but as a species, humans have raised fighting to a planet-wide, all-life-threatening status. For a species that prides itself, defines itself even, on the size of its brain, this activity does not make sense.

The United States of America, of it’s 242 years history, has been at peace with no wars ongoing, external or internal, for just 16 years. Former President Jimmy Carter allegedly pointed this out to Donald Trump in 2019 and added ” We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion [on] military spending. China has not wasted a single penny on war and that’s why they’re ahead of us in almost every way.” One imagines it made little impression on a man whose stance in life is, more often than not, belligerent. I said that animals fight in defense of territory and like the metaphor above, fighting for peace, this sounds a contradiction in terms. Just as the military wing of the government is usually called the Department of Defense or similar – rarely the Department of War as this would imply that waging war was an aim of government – not a response to potential outside aggression.

In George Orwell’s classic novel of a political and dystopian future “Nineteen Eighty-Four” we see how the use of the right terms is vital for the control of the masses by the few. “Great” Britain has become Airstrip One and is a mere province of the superstate Oceania which tells its citizens that is in (perpetual) war and exhorts them to greater effort, greater tightening of the belt (remind you of austerity?). Published just after the Second World War when the Tehran Conference had divided the world up into zones of influence, the book has as many warnings today as ever about the scrutiny we need to place on those who govern…

The other day I heard someone saying on the radio (in the plethora of discussion about Covid 19 I am afraid I didn’t clock the speaker) that we keep referring to the National Health Service workers as the frontline workers in this fight against the virus but that it would be better if the people at large regarded themselves as the front line since it will be the degree of their adherence to not going out that will determine the reduction of deaths at the final reckoning. So we should be the “Home Front” a term that came about during the Second World War to give unity and focus to a population only some of whom were experiencing the direct effects of bombing whilst for those out in the country, there was little immediate evidence of the war raging across the world. Rationing, inventive cooking, improvisation and substitution – all the things we are experiencing under lockdown.

Here is the disconnect at the heart of our mass response to Covid 19 – for most people it is not serious and even if they do catch it it will not feel serious – we can’t see the crisis in the hospitals, only empty streets, shutdown shops and we experience a sense of unreality. Even when we watch the nightly news reports with the climbing death tolls, we do not connect with the reality, over 5000 people in the UK now, that’s a stadium full! If we could have taken it seriously, then we would have started preparing earlier when we heard the reports coming out of China. Logic dictates that if you can pass on an infection before you show symptoms, a pandemic is inevitable but human beings are not notably logical and so the fact that this virus is not evenly fatal fuels the disconnect.

We find ourselves living in the movie set of a post-apocalyptic event (such as a pandemic) but there are no rotting bodies in the streets and no feral gangs of survivors breaking into shut down shops. In this respect, barring some early hoarding of toilet rolls and flour (I blame the Great British Bake-off for making everybody believe they should bake their way through the crisis) the majority of people have responded with the best that humans can be to this strange challenge. Imagine though, how things would have been without the internet to inform and entertain us, to share tips and memes and love.

In the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, things were very different. Coming at the end of the First World War, starting out, it is thought, in a military base in Kansas, the troops heading out to Europe spread it and 20 to 50 million died – more than the 17 million who died in WW1 and this may not be accurate as there was no means of testing the many victims or recording data accurately and even with all of our advanced technology this current pandemic still presents some of the same problems. We do not fully understand why Spanish Flu was so lethal and we have much to learn about why Covid 19 is so lethal for some and not for others. Incidentally, the name Spanish Flu came about because most of the countries involved in WW1 had censorship in place for military purposes and the powers that be suppressed news of the pandemic, afraid of public panic except for Spain which was neutral, had no censorship and freely discussed the disease, including the Spanish King becoming ill. I say this on the day that Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister is reported to be receiving escalating treatment in Intensive Care…

Returning to the metaphorical use of the word fighting – in the world of religion, we have “onward Christian soldiers” and we have Jihad a term which modern Moslems struggle to re-interpret as a metaphorical personal battle for spiritual development and not in its apparent, original meaning of a battle to forcibly convert non-believers. It goes to show how careful we need to be with metaphor – especially those based on images of war and fighting and we need to be especially vigilant that we do not give the latitude to right-wing leaders to take excessive powers under the cover of crisis sending us back to the future of 1984…

I am going to give the last word to that great storyteller and observer of his times – Charles Dickens in his opening to A Tale of Two Cities – almost a perfect metaphor in itself –
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

D is for Death

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Does Death give Meaning to Life?

My mother served in the Second World War as a signaling Sergeant and she said that over the course of the war, there were six men, any of whom she might have made a life with if they hadn’t gone off to where the action was and never come back. In that sentence, I have not used the word death, but you know what I mean. Death is the elephant in the room. My mother had certainly had enough of it and so, when my grandparents died, the first people I knew who died, my sisters and I were not allowed to go to the funeral – my mother did not want to expose us to death. Those funerals were the proper hole in the ground in an English country churchyard funerals. Soon after that though, funerals in England moved, mostly, to being cremations. A poll in 2016 showed that 75% of people in the UK prefer cremation. Whether it is the cost, £1000 more on average, for a traditional funeral; the move away from religion and thus church burials; the lack of space in churchyards – I don’t know the answer to why we have moved away from burials to cremations. But I do know one of the effects of this switch and that is the waiting list that means it can be three or four weeks between a person dying and the catharsis of a funeral.

Why does this wait make a difference? Well in 1995 I went to live in Ireland and at first I was deceived by the fact that everyone spoke “English”, into thinking that the culture was also similar. I mean if you went to France and had to learn to speak a different language, then you would also expect the culture to be different too. So the first thing that made me appreciate the difference in Ireland, was the way of death, or rather, what happens when someone dies. Firstly the word goes out to all relatives and significant friends. Everyone drops what they are doing, all over Ireland and even abroad and by the evening, everyone is at the deceased’s home in time for a service where the body arrives at the church. The night will be spent remembering the person and the next day, everyone goes to another service and the coffin is processed by all the mourners to the local burial ground. Another difference – the burial grounds are usually multi-denominational and the churchyards are not usually used for graves. The party or wake may then continue for the next night or more… Now the Postmaster whose mother had passed at that first Irish funeral I encountered, told me he had been going to funerals in his village all his life but this was the first time he had been at the receiving end of one. For the first time, he realized how supportive it was to have all the family around him so quickly. Contrast this with the three-week wait in England and a quick service at a crematorium in whatever religious denomination you require and another group of mourners lining up outside as you complete. It might only be my opinion, but I feel that in England, we are particularly detached from death.

My partner, on the other hand, feels that the Irish are naturally more demonstrative and that the English have always been more reserved rather than any effect of the war and that children were not taken to funerals because they were not regarded as mature enough for the experience – take your pick or any other answers on a postcard (comment box)…

So different cultures respond differently or if not differently, then in degree, to death both in terms of emotion, practices of remembrance and of religious rituals – but is there some essential similarity? Well, evidence of burying the dead is often taken to be the sign of transition from ape to hominid – a sign that our big brains had developed to the point of self-consciousness where we could imagine an afterlife or conceptualize the preciousness of the Ancestor or simply identify with a corpse and not wish to leave it unburied and prey to animals. All these things require acts of imagination, feats of language and co-operation, all signs of big brain development or to put it another way, funereal arrangements are fundamental to being human.

The Covid 19 is having a very distressing effect as people are essentially dying alone, being buried without ceremony and as so often, when we are deprived of something, we appreciate what we have lost much more. Will we find new ways to celebrate the passing of relatives and friends and strangers?

At the end of the last post, I suggested that life has no intrinsic meaning and I stand by that, but the way that we treat our dead shows that humans create their own meanings, light their own flames of imagination, art, scientific enquiry and philosophy in the dark vastness of the universe. How long that flame will burn given the way we are treating the planet is open to question but as the warnings of Greta Thunberg are temporarily eclipsed by the Covid 19 crisis, there is a little hope in that crisis. Pollution is down, businesses being re-configured, priorities are being re-assessed at all levels from the individual to governments. We are pausing to draw breath and consider where we find ourselves. It’s not all good news though, the forces of repression are trying to claw more influence through emergency powers but then more people have time to scrutinize everything. Who knows where we will be on the other side of the crisis, but we live in interesting times…