During the pandemic we have repeated the mantra, "We're all in this together." But the pandemic will leave some people better off -- and millions of people worse off than they were. That's certainly the case in Britain. Rafael Behr writes:
The language of collective endurance has helped sustain public spirits, but it also elides major sacrifice with acts that, in the wider scheme of human experience, register more as inconvenience: wearing a mask; foregoing meals out.
It might seem callous to talk now about anyone having had a “good pandemic”, but it is dishonest to pretend that the nation will walk out of the darkness together, with one story to tell. The disease has ravaged some and spared others. It gets deadlier with age, but appears also to have discriminated along racial lines for reasons that are not yet fully understood. Partly, that is likely to be a function also of class inequality. Covid thrives on deprivation: crowded accommodation; poor diet; precarious jobs that make it harder for people to self-isolate or take time off work for convalescence.
A release of pent-up consumption by the lucky group will generate flattering growth statistics, although that economic bounce will leave millions behind. Boris Johnson’s MPs will resist efforts to force the winners to subsidise the losers on any adequate scale. The Conservative cult of self-reliance usually provides intellectual anaesthesia against the discomfort of living in a very unequal society. There is less duty to care about unemployment once it is cast as a self-inflicted penalty for idleness. It gets harder to argue along the same lines when a pandemic is the cause of people’s suffering, but then the myth of collective sacrifice and the rhetoric of “hard choices” can be applied to salve wealthy consciences. We are all in it together. Some are just in deeper than others.
And that is the point. Some of us are in much deeper than others.
Image: quotefancy.com
