Love in the time of COVID-19

Monday 16 March 2020

In the next few weeks, it is likely that we will see a great many changes because of the pandemic. It is essential that as a community we come together, with kindness and compassion, to help each other generously. As we learned today, 15 March 2020, all those over 70 years old or with underlying health issues may very soon be asked to self-isolate for a significant period and all these people, our neighbours, and others self-isolating will need help. Authorities are likely to be overloaded so it is down to those neighbours who are able to help – always remembering, that anyone could be the next person to be isolated!

At RVR, we are beginning to organise help for those who need it. To get help, please click on the relevant button below. If you can help (and, really, given the scale of the problem that we are likely to see, this means everyone who is fit and not in a vulnerable category) please click on the volunteer button.

This is a new initiative by my local Residents Association, Ravensbourne Valley Residents. It’s an example of the goodness, kindness and care this situation has brought out and will continue to bring out.

A friend shared videos of Italian neighbours sharing music as a way to keep spirits high during self-isolation/quarantine (see here and here). Apparently this way of coping through music has been copied in many places around the world including Wuhan, Spain, Lebanon.

Scottish novelist/poet Jenni Fagan (@Jenni_Fagan) suggested on Twitter

If there is lock down or isolation periods – I propose all the writers offer story time live streams on here.

It won’t save anyone but each small act might be worth something to somebody.

Ditto musicians/artists/anyone who can cook/tell a joke/or just swear with elegance.

Things are changing rapidly. On Sunday night my wife C pointed out we are reaching out to friends and family now in a way we otherwise might not. She didn’t mean Karaoke over Zoom. But now a friend has sent us this:

How about some karaoke this week?
https://www.vulture.com/2020/03/how-to-host-zoom-karaoke-while-coronavirus-social-distancing.html

I’ll share a how-to on sourdough baking in the next couple of days. Shipton Mill still have flour, apparently, unlike my local supermarket.

Wednesday 18 March 2020

Day two of C and me working from home and taking it in turns to look after our 4-year-old daughter, who is now going to be at home for 14 days because, in her own words, she was “running around outside, got warm and tired, and sat down”, then nursery staff took her temperature, found it was up slightly, and said we had to keep her at home for the next 14 days because that’s their policy during the coronavirus pandemic. She’s completely fine. We made it through day one without breaking a sweat, but day two has been harder. This picture gives a sense of how we’re feeling at this point:

More seriously, the image that comes to my mind is of driving a heavy vehicle up a hill, and shifting into a lower gear so the engine can manage the gradient. An economist might summarise the situation by saying productivity is going to be reduced. There’s a lot more to it than that though, as indicated by a joke made by a colleague, stating that after this is all over there is likely to be a surge in divorces as a result of couples spending more time together in a confined space than they are used to. (There might be a surge in births about 9 months from now, too). Productivity is going to be reduced because it will take more resource to get the same amount of output because we’re all finding new ways to do almost everything.

Friday 20 March 2020

Some thoughts at this point.

Abundance vs scarcity/rationing. I’ve had a tension headache for more than 24 hours. In the past I’d just take paracetamol or ibuprofen without thinking, but right now it’s not clear how long our current supplies of these are going to need to last for, which means I need to weigh up and consider whether I have exhausted other possibilities for tackling the headache: eating, sleeping, yoga, meditation, taking a bath. In other words, taken-for-granted decisions suddenly become things to deliberate on – not simply as a way to pass the time but because they now need to be considered carefully.

Collaborating to find new ways of doing things+forming new habits+climate change. One of my colleagues suggested that we are currently in a transition period, and during this period, as we adjust to this new situation, “the ratio of talking to doing is going to involve much more talking than previously.” Someone else suggested that it takes a month to properly integrate a new habit into how you do things. It increasingly looks like we’re going to have at least a month of this. This is a headache – and an opportunity. Because the scientific consensus is that climate change needs us to change our habits right now, and we won’t unless we are forced to do so. Coronavirus is forcing us to do so.

Boomers. I don’t have a statistically robust sample size, but anecdotal evidence from similarly-aged friends suggests a lot of our boomer parents (individuals born between 1946 and 1964, during the post–World War II baby boom) are really struggling with the idea that they really shouldn’t continue to do what they would normally do (meet up socially, go to restaurants, go to the theatre, travel on public transport). An article on this subject published in the New Yorker a few days ago is, from my perspective, difficult to take seriously because of the opening sentences in its third paragraph, which I can’t really relate to:

This role reversal was . . . novel. I still think of my parents as the grownups, the ones who lecture me about saving for retirement and intervene in squabbles with my little sister. It took a pandemic to thrust me into the role of the responsible adult and them into the role of the heedless children.

The author (Michael Schulman) goes on to say he’s 38 years old. I don’t think many of my similarly-aged friends would recognise their own experience in these sentences. Instead, they would say that for a long time they have been trying (and frequently failing) to play the role of responsible adult in relation to their parents. Coronavirus simply raises the stakes (quite considerably).

Wednesday 25 March

I’m now well past the myth of silver linings. Fear and tetchiness have set in. A certain amount of anger, some of it misplaced. Fed up with all the people without dependent children sending photos of their lunchtime strolls or discussing which film they’re going to watch next. Today I worked in the morning and then, after relinquishing our ‘office’ to my wife for her shift, I found myself caught up in a complex make-believe game in which two unicorns, a bear and a bee took on ‘The Trump Brothers’ (so-called because of their MAGA hats; not sure that’s what Playmobil call them). Needless to say my daughter was involved. Also needless to say that things didn’t work out well for the villains.

Highlight of the day was reading a piece written by a colleague on the psychological impact of the current situation and how to handle it. Key takeaways: reach out to others, take care of others but don’t forget to take care of yourself too, and if you find yourself worrying about whether you are going to get through this then remind yourself that as of now you are getting through this.

 

 

Travels in Eco-land: Naked Larder

Saturday was my third trip to Naked Larder. I try to make it an adventure for my young daughter. At Herne Hill station we go through the ‘underground tunnel’ and then the ‘secret passage’ (under Academic House) before turning to head up the hill, then left on Kestrel Avenue (what a great name for a road) and ‘look for the glove on the gate’. And before we even get to the shed there’s the mystery of the ‘treehouse’ with no tree and no ladder, always prompting the question “how do we get up?”

My wife discovered Naked Larder, not me. I got sent there on the first trip with our daughter, a print-out of our order (made by my wife), and a selection of tupperware and some pillow cases. Gazed round in wonder at all the boxes, and quickly realised that filling up our containers could be easily turned into a game.

I could explain what Naked Larder is, but their website does it better than I could: “We buy dry goods and eco-friendly cleaning products in bulk to minimise packaging and reduce cost. Our customers collect their orders using their own reusable containers. Join us in our quest to create a brighter future for our planet.” Do I feel virtuous as I leave with my coffee beans, bread flour, oats, rice and sugar? Of course I do. I also feel hopeful.

So long, 2018

Why this blog has the name it has

It’s not about throwing rubbish in the ocean, in case you were wondering. One morning in 2015 I watched the sun rise over the ocean from Goubert Avenue in Puducherry (Pondicherry) in India, and saw an elderly couple who appeared to be enjoying the moment in a similar fashion, until I saw the man swing a big plastic bag full of rubbish forwards and backwards, and then fling it out into the waves. That’s not what this blog is about.

Neither is the title of this blog a reference to the Starfish story (versions of which can be read here and here), even though I do try to keep that story in mind as I live my life.

Instead, the title of this blog is about recognising that when we act in this world, we cannot control how our actions are received by others. All we can do is to drop it in the ocean, we don’t know what the ocean will do with it.

The title comes from a specific time in my life. I had just submitted my PhD thesis for examination, and was trying to figure out what to do next. In the process of finalising the text of my thesis, something happened that made me realise that I cannot control how others receive my actions. A friend helped me to understand that this was a lesson worth learning.

One last thing: saying “I cannot control how others receive my actions” is not the same as saying “I’m just going to do whatever I feel like doing.” Since that time of my life, I have learned a couple of other things. One is that it’s worth learning to distinguish where it matters what others think of you, and where the only thing that matters is what you think of yourself. Another thing I have learned is that there are things I can do to increase the chances that others receive my actions the way I intended them to be received.

Ok but WHY did the white men do this? Thoughts on Trump’s victory

By whitney waller (connect-the-dots) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

In this blogpost I take as my starting point Eric Kaufmann’s article “Trump and Brexit: why it’s again NOT the economy, stupid” (on the LSE British Politics and Policy blog). I think Eric has got some useful data but I am not convinced by the way he joins the dots and constructs his story of cause-and-effect. The story I would find more convincing would be to half-agree and half-disagree with him: I think he’s right to say it’s not class, but wrong to say it’s not the economy. I think he’s right to say that there is a values divide (“between those who prefer order and those who seek novelty” as Eric puts it), but he doesn’t convincingly explain the cause of the rise in ‘Right-Wing Authoritarianism’ (which he doesn’t link to white supremacy and misogyny, but should). His argument is that “rapid ethnic change [nationally or locally] leads to an increase in anti-immigration sentiment and populism.” This argument raise a new question: why?

He thinks the answer is that the rise in anti-immigration sentiment and populism is the response of those who can’t deal with rapid ethnic change – because of their values, which favour cultural continuity and order over novelty and diversity. I think there’s some truth in that, but I think that to suggest this is the whole explanation and that the economy has nothing to do with it – which is what Eric seems to do – is bizarre.

A quick look at the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Sun newspapers in the UK, or a quick listen to Trump’s speeches, suggests that anti-immigration sentiment is not simply “they’re not like us, our culture is being eroded”; instead, a really strong narrative stoking anti-immigration sentiment is “they are stealing our jobs and our taxes are going to give them houses and welfare benefits.” In other words, anti-immigration sentiment is closely tied to the economy. In the UK, this narrative goes further in order to target both the EU and human rights legislation: the immigrants are getting jobs and houses and benefits at the expense of natives because the EU’s human rights laws gives them preferential treatment over natives – so we need to get rid of the immigrants, the EU, and human rights legislation. In both the UK and the US, out-of-touch liberal elites are seen as favouring immigrants over natives.

At its core, this is not about Right-Wing Authoritarian voters feeling that rapid ethnic change threatens cultural continuity and order. Instead, it is about these voters coming to believe a narrative, promoted by right-wing populist voices in politics and the media, which sees rapid ethnic change as the cause of specific problems these voters face. Eric is right to say their decision about how to vote didn’t have “much to do with personal economic circumstances,” but only in the sense that rapid ethnic change is not, in fact, the real cause of the problems these voters face.

What he misses is that their decision about how to vote had everything to do with their perception of the cause of their personal economic circumstances. These voters feel as if the immigrants are the cause of the problems they face. They accept that narrative, and ignore data that suggests immigrants are not the cause. And crucially, the problems these people attribute to immigrants are economic problems. The narrative they find compelling and based their voting decision on is about clash of civilisations and competition, and yes, part of that competition is cultural, but a lot of it is economic: it’s about jobs, and who benefits from how the government spends tax revenues.

I think this narrative is factually incorrect insofar as the elites are not really favouring immigrants over natives; instead, I think the elites are favouring themselves over everyone else, and then turning the natives against the immigrants to prevent the natives and immigrants forming an effective coalition against the elites. Values matter insofar as they make divide-and-rule possible, by making it possible to construct immigrants, Muslims, and ‘nasty women’ as scapegoats for what elites are doing to non-elites. And this has been happening to an ever-increasing extent since the 1970s, hand-in-hand with increasingly precarious employment and living conditions for all non-elites. No non-elites like this very much, but non-elites respond to these conditions in different ways, depending on their values. Right-Wing Authoritarians respond by saying “Stop the world, I want to get off.” And more than anyone else, it is white men who say this. Why is that? I think Naomi Klein’s explanation works quite well:

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

Naomi Klein points the finger at the rise of the Davos class, and I think she is right to do so. What this means is that while Eric is right to say it’s not the working-class who voted for Trump, he is wrong to say it’s not the economy. It is the economy: it’s neoliberalism. Moreover, it is class, too: but rather than it being about the working-class, it’s about everyone outside the Davos class.

Things got serious

I started used Creative Commons on this thing.