It Feels Like The First Few Weeks of Covid Again

It is coming up to the five-year- anniversary of the first Covid Lockdown (in the UK) and it struck me a few days ago that the present times feel like those first weeks of March 2020. Trump's fascist takeover is in overdrive. Israel has resumed its genocide in Gaza Trump is gutting the American state, the threat of deportation hangs over every non-citizen who has participated in activism for Palestine or criticized Trump in any form or manner. Just like then, no one knows how the next few weeks and months will pan out. Just like then, I read horror stories in the press but doesn’t know anyone who has been personally affected (yet). And, a sense of foreboding that things will get worse before they get better as the fascist juggernaut has some way to go before it burns out or burns the world. So, I went back to my posts from that period out of curiosity. I was surprised to be reminded that my mental and physical state were poor. In the past few weeks, I haven’t been sleeping great, and I feel myself filling up with tears, but, unlike that past fateful March, my anxiety hasn’t kicked into high gear. My chief fear at that time was how I would cope with losing access to the PhD room at uni, which was my safe haven away from crazy housemates. As it turned out, I coped just fine, and was able to return to the PhD office after a few months. I wouldn’t catch Covid until two years thence, but the pandemic did cause tumult in my life, as it did with most others. Tumult that we didn’t and couldn’t have imagined during those first few weeks of that March. We, and our world, carry those scars with us. But if there is one lesson we can draw (and if one can rue or reminisce the past, one can occasionally learn from it) is that we like our all creatures great and small, are endlessly adaptable. Someone said to “Adapt or perish is nature’s inexorable imperative”. There is, of course, a difference between adaptation and submission. One should not submit to fascism, of all things, and resist as much as possible. As I write this post, I am reminded of a passage from Ship Fever, a short story by one of my favourite authors, Andrea Barrett. The context is the Irish potato famine and the ensuing typhus epidemic and, I think it is worth quoting at some length. “That was what she’d learned from her grandmother, during the days they’d cared for the sick together. You ought not to lie down and let your fate roll over you, her grandmother taught her; neither ought you stand unbending, as her father had, and wait for fate to lop off your head. There was a bending, weaving, cunning way, in which you appeared to give in but rolled aside just slightly, evading the blow at the last minute. The way of eating whenever there was food to eat, sleeping whenever a stray minute came; never angering anyone stronger nor harming anyone weaker. “Make your mind like a pond,” her grandmother had said, when she found Nora weeping at night. “Push away longing and fury, and make your mind still, like water.””