Scene Through A Windscreen

I am sitting in the car park of B&Q, almost against my will. Almost but not really. My wife needed some sand to finish work in the garden she has been doing since March. She was going and asked if I wanted to come. I didn’t. I don’t think we should go anywhere unnecessary while Covid remains a risk. But I also realise that in a few days I have to return to work. Crash back into the busyness of a fully re-opened school and pretend the virus is over. If I can’t pop to B&Q on a Saturday morning, how will I cope being in a small building stuffed with nearly a thousand people next week?

So I agreed to go, but started to get the familiar feelings of a panic attack as the reality of leaving the house grew closer. After a few weeks exploring the wider world and acclimatising to the new normal out there I was looking forward to three calm days before term begins sequestered in the comfort and safety of home. My brain doesn’t cope well with changes of plan, and the idea of leaving such sanctuary without prior psyching myself into it was a struggle. Fighting anxiety, minor agoraphobia, and refusing to let my stupid mind get in the way, but knowing that standing in the queue watching others fail to observe social distancing would kill me, I agreed to come with her but sit in the car. Leave the house, interact with the world, but only at a distance to calm my crawling consternation. 

But sitting here you wouldn’t know we are still in the middle of a global pandemic with no cure. In an area of the country where cases are rising, in a country which has had far too many preventable infections and deaths already. If it weren’t for the masks on most, but not all, people walking from their cars the scene in front of me looks like any other Bank Holiday Saturday outside a DIY centre. Full car park. Queues. Crowds. People chatting and families going shopping. It’s terrifying.

I get that we don’t like being forced inside, forced to limit what we do, but I still can’t get my head around the clear evidence that so many people think that just because they’re bored of these restrictions that somehow it makes everything safe again.

And so many of these people are the families of children I, or some other teacher, will be teaching in the weeks to come. Thirty to a class. Each one belonging to a connection of individuals making hundreds of potentially risky choices, including the teacher standing in front of them. All of us bringing the consequences of those choices into a small classroom and sharing the air with each other for an hour or more.

In recent weeks attempts have been made by media and government to shift the blame for the virus’ resurgence on specific groups of people. Young people having parties; certain ethnic groups the right-wing press already demonise doing things they don’t like; those economically unable to make better choices, etc. But it is clear to me that Covid 19’s second wave (if we can call a wave something that has never really stopped. More a continuous current?) will not lie at the feet of any one group, despite all the attempts at scapegoating. It will lie in the hundred little choices we all make, wrongly, about what is and isn’t “worth the risk”. Popping here, popping there, touching this, touching that. Forgetting to wash our hands that one time, dismissing something as “just a cold” and interacting with others without thinking.

The thing is, I know we can’t eliminate risk entirely, and there is definitely such a thing as being over-cautious. But I also know that this could be handled so much better by all if we had a different economic system and set of driving forces behind the decision making. If we weren’t being constantly told it’s our patriotic duty to go back out there and feed the economy. If our focus was altruism, and the safety of others, as it was at the start, instead of what it has become: a return to selfishness and not wanting our freedoms impinged by consideration of how it might affect someone else.

In March, for a few weeks, we saw a glimpse of our potential. That glimpse scared those in charge, and they are desperate to get things back to the way they were so we don’t get any funny ideas about restructuring our lives to be more focused on people instead of profits. 

I guess it’s just disheartening to see how easy it has been for them to do that to us.

We really are Romero’s zombies, shuffling back to the shopping mall so we can continue consuming even as the world collapses all around us.