Heroes Not Zombies

It’s not hard to find a pile of nets and ropes on the dockside at any little fishing village or port. I often find them quite fascinating and sometimes, like this one, quite beautiful. Look at the gorgeous palette of colours in this photo!

Without fail these images make me hear the word “entangled” in my head, and that’s one of my favourite words. It captures both the idea that everything is connected, and the fact that you can’t touch, or interact, with any single “element” without affecting everything else. It’s like the “butterfly effect”, where a small change in a complex system cascades throughout the entire network and has unpredictable significant over all changes – in the case of the butterfly effect linking the changes in air pressure and movement in one part of the world to storm and hurricane systems in other parts.

Well, that’s sure something we’ve had proven to us during the last year isn’t it? Even now, we hear of a “mutation” in the coronavirus, in one country and within a few days we’re hearing of it turning up around the entire planet. We sure are all “entangled” with each other, aren’t we?

There’s an aspect of this entanglement which has bothered me during this pandemic, and it comes up in the way that politicians and, also, many experts, are dealing with it.

It seems pretty clear that the present emerges out of the past. In other words we find ourselves in this current predicament because we’ve been living in a certain way. Yet, repeatedly, governments don’t want to admit “mistakes” or to look back and understand how our societies became so vulnerable. Probably because they don’t want to admit responsibility, but sometimes because it doesn’t fit with their favourite set of beliefs.

Would the health services in Western Europe be under such stress if they had been better resourced and organised over the last couple of decades? Of course, we can’t know for certain, but if the present really is entangled with the past, then can’t we try to understand how we became so vulnerable?

And if the present is also entangled with the future, which surely it is, then if we are to become more resilient then we need to create healthier societies. This virus has made it absolutely clear that those who will be hit hardest are those who are already the most frail and vulnerable.

I’d like to see politicians begin to lay out plans for our “exit strategy” from this pandemic which don’t rely entirely on technological fixes, but which, instead, firstly, develop and deploy better health and social care, to be better able to help and heal when help and healing is needed, but, secondly, to reduce poverty, poor housing, poor education, poor nutrition, inequality and environmental damage.

That would seem like a good place to start.