#disabled in so many ways as punishment for being under the control of a virus and then killed him as punishment again

[monty-glasses-roxy]

@maxwaspace

Sure!

It's the trope of disability being a punishment, that the people that are disabled or become disabled are bad people and/or deserve it. The entire game centres around Gregory being hunted down by animatronics and then disabling them in different ways because of that.

Basically, causing each animatronic to be disabled except for Freddy is justified by the fact they're the antagonists of the game that are trying to kill you.

Disability in real life is just a normal thing that happens to anyone, regardless of what they've done or what their morals are. But in media, disability is more often something the villains have, again, because they're bad and deserve it, or the disability made them into villains.

So Gregory disables the animatronics because they're trying to kill him. Only the animatronics that are trying to kill you are disabled. They're even worse in Ruin, with Roxy possibly only attacking you because she's been disabled, given she's still hunting Gregory and can't see who you are. Monty apparently loses most cognitive function with his legs too and he gets electrocuted in water.

And this is without factoring the issues with Sunny and Moon's representation as dissociative identity disorder. One personality is good, while the other one wants you dead is a really big trope that demonises mental disability too so like...

Yeah there's not a lot in the game for the animatronics that isn't ableist ngl

Oh yeah last night I realised that Security Breach is not just quietly ableist, but the entire fucking game is one giant ableist trope. Insane.

[razieltwelve]

Extermination Protocol (Final Rose)

Although the Arendelle Empire strives to safeguard the lives and property of its citizens, this is not always possible. In certain situations, a threat may become so great that it becomes necessary to deploy any and all means of extirpating it, up to and including the destruction of the planets and systems involved. In such situations, the Empire shifts from standard operating procedure to the extermination protocol.

What follows is a brief account of several incidents that demanded the use of the extermination protocol.

Specimen Cobalt

Cobalt III was a world located at the very frontier of occupied space. Despite having a habitable surface, the poor quality of the soil and the extreme temperatures outside of a small equatorial area made permanent settlement all but impossible. However, the discovery of rare metals led to a sharp increase in the number of prospectors and mining groups on the planet.

During excavation of a new mine, a family of prospectors encountered a heretofore unknown life form. This life form, now known as Specimen Cobalt, possessed a complex cellular structure, which allowed it to rapidly adapt to foreign environments while altering its physical shape for maximum effectiveness. What made Specimen Cobalt so dangerous was its method of reproduction.

Specimen Cobalt did not reproduce in any conventional sense. Instead, it consumed organic matter to increase its own biomass. As it grew larger, it became capable of increasingly complex thought, allowing it to guide its own evolution. Although the exact timeframe of the following disaster is difficult to be certain of, records recovered from Cobalt III suggest that Specimen Cobalt immediately killed and consumed the family that had discovered it.

Within two days, the settlement closest to the new mine was devoid of life. At that point, miners from another settlement stumbled upon the scene and immediately called for assistance from the other settlements. A force composed primarily of mining security and individuals with combat experience was dispatched from the other settlements to investigate the situation.

The entire force was consumed by Specimen Cobalt. Records indicate the specimen was initially similar to a rat in size. Footage recovered from recorders present at the site of the confrontation show a far larger specimen, one several times larger than a house.

Specimen Cobalt demonstrated the use of advanced combat tactics (e.g., burrowing to avoid detection and flight to improve mobility). Following the destruction of the investigatory force, Specimen Cobalt proceeded to attack and destroy the other major settlements on Cobalt III. Only then did the mining groups on the planet call for aid.

Although Cobalt III was an independent world outside of Imperial jurisdiction, the destroyer Roar of Thunder responded. They arrived shortly after to find that the entire populace of the planet had already been consumed by Specimen Cobalt, which had grown as large as the destroyer itself. The specimen attempted to leave the planet using a combination of wings and specially evolved organs but was forced back to the surface by the Roar. 

Specimen Cobalt burrowed deep beneath the surface to avoid further attack and retaliated by extruding organs capable of shooting virulent acid into low orbit. The Roar retreated to high orbit only to come under attack from biologically produced plasma. The captain of the Roar called for immediate assistance and a number of other vessels were dispatched along with a science team.

Further investigation by the science team determined that Specimen Cobalt had evolved to process inorganic matter as well and was consuming the planet itself to increase its size and capabilities. More troubling was the launch of what appeared to be spores and eggs into space. The vessels around the planet intercepted these objects and the extermination protocol was invoked. Specimen Cobalt could not be allowed to survive, nor could it be allowed to reproduce.

Containment shields were put in place to prevent any matter escaping the planet, and a full bombardment ensued. The resulting plasma annihilated the planet, and a singularity bomb was then fired, ensuring that nothing could survive. The rest of the system was also swept for any sign of Specimen Cobalt, and a warning was placed across the entire system. Failure to report any life forms similar to Specimen Cobalt became a crime punishable by death.

The Necroplague

Although fiction regarding zombies has been commonplace since the days of Remnant, it was only much later that civilisation actually encountered real zombies. 

The necroplague was a horrific virus that first killed its victims before reanimating them. Reanimated individuals had only one goal: to spread the plague further by killing and infecting others. Later research would show that the reanimated belonged to some kind of gestalt being, the central drives of which were to feed and grow, no matter the cost.

The necroplague first entered occupied space when a damaged exploration craft sought safe harbour at an outlying space station not far from Imperial territory. The pilot of the vessel was the sole survivor of what was at first thought to be some kind of animal attack. However, examination of the vessel’s records revealed the true fate of the ship’s crew. They had been exploring for alien ruins, well aware of the potential dangers but also the potentially vast rewards. They had encountered a sealed chamber and had breached it thinking it would contain valuables. Instead, they found a desiccated corpse… which promptly attacked the leader of the expedition.

The explorers beat a hasty retreat after destroying the corpse with gunfire. However, during their return flight to civilisation, the man who had been attacked turned on his crew mates, killing all of them but the pilot. However, the pilot himself was infected due to a bite he had suffered. By the time station officials realised the truth, it was too late. The pilot had attacked and infected more than a dozen hospital workers.

Within a day, the entire space station was infected. Worse, several ships had managed to breach standard containment procedures and fled, carrying infected with them. In less than a week, more than a dozen worlds were struggling to hold back the tide of infected.

Faced with a zombie plague on its borders, the Empire dispatched an entire fleet to deal with the problem. Where worlds had already fallen, they burned them from orbit before dispatching probes to ensure that no infected had survived. Elsewhere, they deployed robotic war machines to deal with the infected and safeguard the civilian population while thorough scanning took place to ensure any evacuees were not infected.

However, the crisis reached new levels when it was discovered that the infected were capable of fusing with machinery and seizing control of it creating what the Dia-Farron referred to as ‘robo-zombies’. All robotic forces at risk of exposure were given immediate orders to self-destruct if disabled, and all synthetics were withdrawn from the infected worlds.

As the robo-zombies began to demonstrate increasingly advanced cognitive functions including attempts at constructing rudimentary spacecraft, a directive to institute the extermination protocol was issued. The fleet immediately opened fire on the infected worlds, devastating them and planting weaponry to turn the outer layer of each planet into molten slag. 

Terraforming has since returned many of the devastated worlds to their natural state, but attempts to find the exact source of the necroplague remain unsuccessful. It is only a matter of time, some researchers say, before it appears again.

The Madness

The exact causes of the Madness were known until well into the crisis. It began in fairly pedestrian fashion with the inhabitants of an independent frontier world overthrowing their government. Such occurrences at not unusual on frontier worlds, especially those beyond the reach and administration of the major galactic powers. What set this particular rebellion, which occurred on a mining world Verdant VII, apart was how quickly the rebellion seemed to spread to neighbouring systems.

Within months, dozens of other worlds had overthrown their governments. At first, galactic authorities believed it was a fledgling independence movement. However, their negotiators returned… different. it was only when a descendant of Jihl Nabaat was sent that the cause became clear.

Someone - or something - was psychically influencing and controlling the rebelling worlds. Worse, it seemed to have the ability to spread its influence with increasing rapidity. Once the nature of the threat became clear, an Imperial blockade was instituted, and an elite unit made up of individuals with psychic-related Semblances deployed.

After close investigation, they learned that the inhabitants of Verdant VII had inadvertently summoned something after attempting to repair a damaged hyperspace gateway that had been discovered in ruins on the planet’s surface. The entity that emerged had taken control of their minds and set about expanding its power.

Worse was to come. Analysis of the data obtained by psychically gifted infiltrator by Dia-Farron scientists revealed a horrifying truth. All of the psychically-influenced individuals were essentially walking corpses. Research revealed that the entity responsible had been slowly consuming their Aura to feed its powers and grow more powerful. After a period of little more than two weeks, most individuals would be nothing more than puppets for it, devoid of any and all life without its continued support.

The only viable way of stopping the spread was to strike at the heart of the contagion. A strike team led by the bearers of Saviour and Ragnarok was dispatched. The bearers of the two Semblances had long been thought to be completely immune to psychic influence and mental domination (certainly no Imperial psychic had ever managed to sway them), and the mission would prove them correct.

The entity responsible was in the middle of expanding the hyperspace gateway when the strike team struck. The team was able to kill the creature, a bloated mass of twisted flesh that seemed to pulse and glow with psychic energy, but not before the gateway activated. After activation, the creature was reanimated. Apparently, the bulk of its body existed in another dimension. The strike team engaged it again and killed it once more. Unfortunately, the creature’s death also resulted in the deaths of all it had indoctrinated, leaving a colossal death toll. 

Research by the Dia-Farron would prove illuminating. The creature belonged to a race of trans-dimensional beings that went from dimension to dimension, enslaving other races and opening gateways to call in more of their kin. Outraged by this attack, the emperor at the time called for punitive measures.

It took almost a decade, but the Dia-Farron were not only able to develop countermeasure to psychic influence but also determine how to use the hyperspace gateway on Verdant VII to reach the home dimension of the creature without risking further loss of life. Stealth probes through the gateway revealed that creature’s home dimension was highly unstable due to spatial and temporal fissures caused by psychic energy. However, the creatures needed regular contact with it in order to sate their appetite for psychic energy since few dimensions had the latent psychic energy available in their home dimension. That was one of the reasons they inevitably enslaved others - it was their way of securing a food supply.

The emperor decreed a switch to extermination protocols, and the Dia-Farron were tasked with building a weapon capable of ending the threat permanently. Their solution was a psychic bomb. They designed it in conjunction with the Empire’s psychics and fired it through the gateway into the creature’s dimension. The result was a devastating shockwave of psychic energy that completely destabilised the dimension, causing it to collapse. The shockwave also spread to minds linked to the dimension, and Dia-Farron scientists believe that it had more than a billion times the power necessary to kill every member of the creature’s species.

[makingscipub]

Bubbles: A short history

Last week we heard a lot about bubbles, especially school bubbles and travel bubbles. This metaphor has been bubbling up for a while during the pandemic and I became curious about how and where it emerged.

Then I saw a tweet from Gareth Enticott which contained an article about New Zealand researchers who had come up with the concept of ‘bubble’. It was then taken up enthusiastically by Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister, and subsequently became a model for other countries. In this blog post I want to tell the story of how the bubbles spread. But, of course, this is only scratching the very surface…

A life-affirming idea

The article indicated by Gareth appeared in the Otago Bulletin Board – a news website maintained by the University of Otago. It says that “Dr Tristram Ingham, a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at the University of Otago, Wellington, developed the concept [of bubble] while advising the Ministry of Health on the COVID-19 response for the disability sector”.

What he and his co-workers wanted to do was to capture “the imagination of both the Prime Minister and the nation, and help[ed] frame life under Alert Levels 4 and 3 more positively”. This was the time when social/physical distancing became a new mode of life around the world, but as Ingham said: “We didn’t want at risk communities to be passive recipients of their fate. The methods had to be around empowering individuals and whānau [an extended family or community of related families who live together in the same area] to have control over their own life and situations for self-preservation.”

This empowering and life-affirmative aspect of ‘bubbles’ is something I hadn’t really appreciated until reading this article.

The familiarity of bubbles

But why bubbles? As Ingham pointed out: “Bubbles are a universally known concept, which could be made appealing to children or to people that didn’t have a public health background. They could think of a bubble as a fragile yet beautiful structure that has to be nurtured and preserved. And it introduced the concept of making sure you don’t burst your bubble.”

As we say in metaphor circles, bubbles are a rich and familiar ‘source’ domain that can be easily mapped onto an abstract ‘target’ domain, such as pandemic risk management, and lead to new ways of thinking, talking and acting.

As Peter Adams pointed out in an article for the University of Auckland: “We are very familiar with the behaviour of bubbles: they froth on the ocean, they slide down the dishes, and they glide by on those summer afternoons when children form them with detergent and plastic hoops. The use of bubbles here conjures up an image of me and my loved ones floating around inside a transparent membrane that separates my group out from others and protects us from unwanted intrusion.”

Viral bubbles

The concept went viral and spread around the world. I wanted to follow this spread a bit and therefore looked at the news database Nexis to see how it went. This was not easy, as ‘bubble’, even with ‘AND covid’ ‘OR coronavirus’ brought tens of thousands of hits. So I narrowed the search to ‘bubble AND social group AND covid OR coronavirus’ and that, finally, gave me 82 hits that I could look at in diachronic order. I also looked for ‘Jacinda Ardern AND bubble’ just to see when New Zealand first talked about this. And supplemented it all with some incidental finds on the internet….not the neatest search I have ever done!

Creativity and flexibility

Bubbles as metaphors have been around for a long time and have been used in various contexts, from rumours bubbling up, to the south sea bubble, to social media bubbles which, we are all told, are not good for us. However, in the context of the pandemic, bubbles became more ‘real’ in a sense. Bubbles came to stand for what some call ‘micro-communities’ (Indian Express June 5, 2020).

Here is one visual representation I found, probably originating in China, but I can’t find the artist and here are many more.

The word bubbles attracted lots of other words and so we got : social bubbles, quarantine bubbles, home-bubbles, iso-bubbles (Sydney Morning Herald, 2 June), travel bubbles, bubbles mates, support bubbles, school bubbles, year-group bubbles, class bubbles – even quaranteam as a synonym for bubble, invented in March by a British couple quarantining in South Korea (Mirror, 7 March). In the United States, a synonym of bubbles was ‘pods’, it seems, although it seems that the concept, although spreading informally, was never part of a formal policy, as it was in other countries more keen on social distancing and isolation.

It should also be stressed that bubbles do not only encourage linguistic creativity, they are also flexible and adaptive enough to allow for changing uses over time. As an article in Slate pointed out on 6 May: “What makes the bubble idea an effective communication tool is not just its simplicity but also its ability to morph along with changing regulations. As New Zealand now moves into a lighter stage of restrictions, the concept of the bubble is adjusting with it. Under the more relaxed alert Level 3, New Zealand authorities are allowing bubbles to slowly open.”

Let’s start at the beginning.

March

The end of March, when New Zealand went into strict lockdown, seems to have been the time when bubbles first became a thing in New Zealand. As Peter Adams described in his article from which I already quoted above: “On March 23, when declaring the lockdown, Ardern said, ‘We have a window of opportunity to break the chain of community transmission.’ Her reference to ‘windows’ and ‘chains’ make use of common metaphors, perhaps too common to register specifically in our minds. However, in her next daily briefing she floated another more specific metaphor. We heard her encourage us to, ‘stick to your bubble,’ and ‘you can’t spend time with other people outside of your bubble’. […] By whatever process Ardern and her team came up with the bubble metaphor, during the course of the next two months it has proved a very effective way of communicating some key understandings.”

We now know by what process they came up with the concept! Let’s now look more closely at how it spread through time and space.

It seems that ‘bubbles’ first appeared in the news in an article on 24 March in The New Zealand Herald quoting Jacinda Ardern. At the same time, in a complementary article, one of New Zealand’s foremost pandemic communicators, Dr Siouxsie Wiles, answered questions (she also produced the imaged featured above, which is part of a famous gif).

The article said: “She reiterated Jacinda Ardern’s words of seeing our household ‘as our bubble’ and stay within that bubble. Wiles says there are exceptions to the ‘one household, one bubble’ guideline, such as parents with shared custody of children. Those two households can be considered one bubble.… You can help people out but ‘do not enter their bubble’. The exception is for people who live alone, who can have a ‘buddy system’ set up with someone else who lives alone. They can enter each other’s ‘bubbles’.”

Like ‘lockdown’, ‘bubbles’ are rooted in the conceptual metaphor of a ‘container’. A container metaphor is an ontological metaphor in which some concept is represented as having an inside and an outside, and as capable of holding something else. But bubbles and lockdown are quite different, of course. Lockdown conjured up images of prison, entrapment and house arrest, of crime and punishment, while bubbles conjure up images of (fragile) protection, responsibility and mutual support. Both play an important role in the ‘containment’ of a pandemic disease.

April

On 5 April, when Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital with Covid-19, bubbles were talked about in The Guardian here in the UK: “Before the lockdown, Ms Ardern asked Kiwis to ‘apply common sense’ and shrink down their social group to ‘a small group of individuals who are part of your bubble… the bubble you must maintain’ for the month.” That article was reproduced in many newspapers which also reported on a New Zealand ‘bonk ban’….

On 15 April, the MailOnline used the concept when listing 275 ways of slowing the spread of the virus devised by a team at the University of Cambridge: “’Focus on constraining ‘long connections between people in different social groups who seldom or rarely interact (e.g. people with a shared hobby or interest rather than short connections between people in similar social groups who regularly interact with one another (e.g. close family, colleagues, close friends),’ the report authors write. They go on to suggest governments might ‘Ask people to identify their bubble – being everyone they live with or must have contact with during ‘lockdown’- and ask people to stay as much as possible within their bubble, ‘a piece of advice they apparently borrowed from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden. ‘Making this happen will be up to the people responsible for every element of society,’ said Professor Sutherland.”

From end of April bubbles appeared in newspaper headlines, and puns emerged around ‘burst bubbles’ etc. The concept was becoming mainstream in the UK, Canada, the US, Belgium etc. but with varying degrees of formal or policy endorsement. The small sample of articles I looked at did not contain any press coverage from the United States.

May

In early May, when bubbles became more and more popular, various disadvantages of bubbles were discussed, for example, interestingly, on Fox News (3 May): “MCDOWELL: …The Belgian government is toying with an idea that can help limit the pandemic. It would allow people to form social bubbles of 10 people maximum, no overlapping with other groups. …  GUTFELD: This is a bad idea because it’ll cause social signaling. Like oh, hey, guys, I can’t see you tonight. I’m in Bret Baier’s bubble. […] You know, everybody’s going to be humble bragging about what bubble they’re in. And then how do families divvy up a bubble if you got like three kids. It’s going to be a new kind of disaster, domestic strife.”

There were some social dilemmas around bubbles, as discussed in the New York Times, but I don’t think it was as bad as that.

June

On 5 June The Telegraph (again, one should add, interestingly!) even wrote about how to decline a bubble invitation: “Those who dreamt up the idea of social bubbles clearly had no consideration for the chaos that would ensue. ‘If you decline to be in someone’s social bubble, you run the risk of not being included in anyone’s social group,’ says Harrold. ‘If an offer comes along, and it’s people you feel comfortable with, you’ve got to accept it.’ He advises that it can be helpful to think of the social bubble as an official contract; sign up, try it out, and leave if it’s not working for you.”

June was the month when bubbles became mainstream. And empirical studies of bubbles were undertaken at the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

On Wednesday 10 June, Boris Johnson made an announcement that adults who lived alone would be allowed to form a “support bubble” with another household. However, it seems this was not a straightforward ‘we follow the science’ decision. As reported in The Guardian, scientists were ambivalent, it seems: “Other Sage documents point to the extreme concern scientists had about the introduction of social bubbles whereby households could meet up to form small social groups. In mid-May, the experts urged ‘strong caution’ over bringing in bubbles when other distancing measures had only just been lifted.”

There is thus a difference between New Zealand and the UK. In the former, bubbles were part of the lockdown policy right from the start, in the latter they were part of a gradual easing of lockdown policy. This was the case in most countries, such as Belgium and also Canada where people began to talk about ‘double bubbles’ in June. Even in Germany there was talk of ‘Blasen’ or ‘die Bubble’.

July

On 4 July, some people ‘celebrated’ ‘Independence Day’, when social distancing rules were substantially relaxed in England. People could go to pubs and restaurants, and bubbles became a literal reality, as in this picture of dining pods (and here is a different one featured by CNN; and and older version of a bubble tent in care homes in Germany)!

At the moment the following rules apply when going out for a drink, as reported by The Sun on 4 July: “Punters who meet indoors can only meet in groups of up to two households or support bubbles. Outdoor meet ups should only take place in groups of up to 2 households (or support bubbles), or a group of 6 people from any number of households.”

Bubbles, bubbles…

Since Jacinda Ardern first told New Zealanders to form their own bubbles, the bubble has gone the way of all good viral concepts. As Dr Ingham, it’s inventor, said: “We lost control of the narrative. What I think is quite interesting and ironic is that it seems to be being picked up internationally and a whole bunch of other academics are starting writing about what it means, and the symbology of it. In some cases, they are reading more into it than I even thought at the time.” So we now got meta-bubbles and this post is one of them, I am afraid to say.

Image: Wikimedia Commons, part of a gif by Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris

    The post Bubbles: A short history appeared first on Making Science Public.

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[pensarelvirus]

The pandemic is a portal /  Arundhati Roy

. Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs? Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!”

.

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered.

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.  

 The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists?

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed.

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”.

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers.

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed.

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

 As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.   

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual.

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

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State governments in India (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear.

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

 As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting.

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place.

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now.

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

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Arundhati Roy’s latest novel is ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’

Fuente: https://www.ft.com/content/Arundhati Roy

[Publicado 3/abril/2020]