pandemic 2

PANDEMIC!
Things are much more ambiguous: the threat of death
does also unite them—to maintain a corporeal distance
is to show respect to the other since I also may be a virus
bearer. My sons avoid me now because they are afraid
they will contaminate me. What for them would likely
be a passing illness can be deadly for me. If in the Cold
War the rule of survival was MAD (Mutually Assured
Destruction), now it is another MAD—mutually assured
distance.
In the last days, we hear repeatedly that each of us is
personally responsible and has to follow the new rules.
Media are full of stories about people who misbehaved
and put themselves and others in danger, an infected
man enters a store and coughs on everyone, that sort
of thing. The problem with this is the same as the journalism
dealing with the environmental crisis: the media
over-emphasize our personal responsibility for the problem,
demanding that we pay more attention to recycling
and other behavioral issues. Such a focus on individual
responsibility, necessary as it is to some degree, functions
as ideology the moment it serves to obfuscate the bigger
questions of how to change our entire economic and
social system. The struggle against coronavirus can only
88