Things are moving fast. While stock markets are taking a nosedive and Italy becomes the Hubei of Europe, New York's mayor has recommended that workers who can should work from home to ease crowding on the subways, and that those who have to commute during rush hour explore other ways of getting to work such as cycling. Meanwhile some American universities have moved classes online, including several in New York. Ours diplomatically promised an "Alternative Teaching and Learning Week" when we return from our Spring Break in two weeks, but the campus - and the city - already felt emptier today. I'll ask my class tomorrow if they'd like to go online for Thursday's class, and am close to deciding to go online for the Wednesday lecture class too.
The coronavirus is in the background of every conversation. I could vent at the way political dysfunction - structural as well as more recent - has put my fellow citizens at risk or the evident difficulty of thinking about public health in a neoliberal society but instead let me worry about the inevitable scapegoating and ostracism, by politicians and, to some extent, everyone else which are swirling around our feet as we speak.
Everything I read plays into the already already dangerous tendency to blame victims and indeed to render them enemies. It maddens me that we have no better way of talking about the spread of the virus than to make an infected person the agent of others’ infections: one patient infected X others. No, she didn't. But how else can we describe it without pretending there's no danger of contagion? X people were infected by one patient… is just the same thing again, just hidden in the passive. What if we said instead: The virus was able to spread to six others through a single patient? I suppose that makes our relative powerlessness palpable, but wouldn't that lead to more compassionate, cooperative, civic-minded responses?
The coronavirus is in the background of every conversation. I could vent at the way political dysfunction - structural as well as more recent - has put my fellow citizens at risk or the evident difficulty of thinking about public health in a neoliberal society but instead let me worry about the inevitable scapegoating and ostracism, by politicians and, to some extent, everyone else which are swirling around our feet as we speak.
Everything I read plays into the already already dangerous tendency to blame victims and indeed to render them enemies. It maddens me that we have no better way of talking about the spread of the virus than to make an infected person the agent of others’ infections: one patient infected X others. No, she didn't. But how else can we describe it without pretending there's no danger of contagion? X people were infected by one patient… is just the same thing again, just hidden in the passive. What if we said instead: The virus was able to spread to six others through a single patient? I suppose that makes our relative powerlessness palpable, but wouldn't that lead to more compassionate, cooperative, civic-minded responses?
