coronavirus

Isolated, Day 3

Posted on by Jimmy

The national government took steps to restrict all nonessential movement. Patricia and I are a few days ahead, staying in our village since Friday, only interacting with friends and family through our phones and our elderly neighbors from a safe distance.

We both work from home but it’s still mentally and spiritually taxing to realize self-isolation will probably be for many weeks. Obviously there was never a choice, but yesterday countless hashtags and videos popped up of people treating this as a vacation or others going to meet friends at the bar for one last night together. Excuse while I remove my palm from my face.

The future is very uncertain. But we have to continue on in different ways. Our governments will fail us to protect markets. Loss of life at a higher rate is practically inevitable. We must rely on each other for support and we must learn from this after we make it through.

I’m taking the self-isolation to actually get serious about a few things. I’ve often said this and then I get lazy or too caught up in some other thing, but now it’s not optional. There is time and no social activities to distract myself.

  1. Write as much as possible. That includes trying to post something here and actually write my West African Islamo-fantasy project.
  2. Read Marx’s Capital with the help of a friend’s husband’s project MARXdown, the Penguin Classics Ben Fowkes translation, and David Harvey’s lectures.
  3. Continue helping build a network of DSA members who live abroad to leverage our internationalist socialist perspectives for progress and solidarity back home.

If you’re interested in hearing Brace and Liz from TrueAnon talk about what’s coming, I really recommend this episode. Liz made the point of being there for people, in her case, on Twitter, as a way of coping with it herself and that is so important right now.

So if you’re reading this, reach out if you want. Even if we’ve never met. Thanks for reading.

Temporary New Normal

Posted on by Jimmy

Every morning brings more news from the United States or other parts Europe and the measures put in place to control COVID-19. It’s changing rapidly. Madrid and País Vasco are the worst. The regional newspaper La Voz de Galicia says “Spain is now Italy and Madrid is Wuhan”.

A few weeks ago, authorities in Galicia thought we could avoid the worst of it. There were only a few cases, mostly in A Coruña area. Now however, we have many confirmed cases, 15 confirmed in our province and perhaps a few in our town.

The Xunta has closed everything except supermarkets, gas stations, and pharmacies. We haven’t stocked up on anything and probably won’t panic buy, especially not toilet paper (Muslim pro tip: use a lota, look it up 👍🏼). We have three markets in town, one on the edge closest to our village. I don’t think panic will set in like it might in larger, denser cities.

And so, we isolate ourselves, continue to work from home (which is an unbelievable privilege), and try keep ourselves entertained. We have the woods and our monte very close. I’ve already FaceTimed more friends back home than in the last month. I also started a Twitter account and Telegram group of Democratic Socialists of America members who live abroad and want to start organizing. For what yet, it’s unclear, but there’s

I try to keep up on happenings, and check GCiencia for a good map of cases in the Galicia.

Be safe, everyone. Keep your distance, but reach out to neighbors, family, and friends. We need to support each other and all we have is each other.

We’re All on This Sick Planet Together

Posted on by Jimmy

Kate Aronoff writing about the intersection of climate change and coronavirus in the current moment in The New Republic:

The image of foreigners spreading disease is rich terrain for the far right. It’s a version of what the American eugenicist-ecologist Garrett Hardin termed “lifeboat ethics.” An inspiration for the far right, Hardin in the 1970s imagined a zero-sum game for planetary survival, where the world’s mostly black and brown poor would compete with the wealthy for resources, threatening to pollute air, water, and bloodlines alike toward disastrous ends. Keeping people out, Hardin argued, prevents them from being a drain on nature and allows the rest of the population to stay healthier and more genetically pure. In addition to draconian immigration measures, he pushed for population control. “We never really conquer any diseases finally,” Hardin argued in an interview toward the end of his life, “and the bigger the population is, the harder it is to control.”

White supremacy and closed borders are as poor an answer to the coronavirus as they are to the climate crisis and certainly won’t solve either problem, making life far more dangerous for many as the world warms. Like it or not, we’re all in this boat together. As pointed out yesterday even by the thoroughly Republican Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, “We cannot hermetically seal off the United States to a virus.”

There are, in fact, well-known and effective steps an interested government could take to defend against the coronavirus. Yet few places seem as ill-suited for dealing with a pandemic as the U.S. under the current administration. Our patchy, expensive, and inefficient health care system is already charging people thousands of dollars to get tested for the coronavirus, discouraging the kind of early diagnosis necessary for containment. The expense could prevent millions from seeking treatment, spurring the spread and death count alike. Meanwhile, 40-plus years of right-wing attacks on the public sphere have drained capacity and talent from the government, making it harder to take on big problems at scale. And a bipartisan panic about budget deficits has made large-scale spending on anything but wars virtually unthinkable.