From his first-hand experience in Luxembourg, Andrew (Pfannkuche) has confirmed my own impression from early in the pandemic. I was dismayed by the implicit sense that students are mainly a threat to their teachers or professors.
It’s too early to judge the success and failure of the pandemic response; but even if governments were right to close schools and restrict social contacts, the public discussion of these measures was one-sided and short-sighted. In other disasters, the principle of “protect the children first” prevails. How seriously was the damage inflicted by school closings on children and on their working parents weighed against the dangers of transmitting infection? It is true that the media registered the fact that middle or upper class families could adapt more readily by means of remote work and learning pods than could working class families. Less attention was accorded to the adults’ obligations to accept risks in times of crisis. Why should teachers be spared the risk of contact when health care workers and supermarket employees are not? Thefear and outrage of teachers and professors was audible. I don’t remember that supermarket employees received the same attention. The humble worker who faces an unending line of strangers while bagging the groceries they could just as well bag for themselves does not count. Perhaps this discussion did occur and I missed it. It was easy to miss.
In wars, the solidarity of military units demands that no one should be left behind in the field. Yet the old and isolated were left to their own devices and the sick often died without the consoling presence of their loved ones. The suffering was largely invisible to the non-suffering population. I was the rare exception. In the first summer, I saw an older woman collapse on a backstreet intersection near my home. I got out of my car, helped her to her feet, and tried to persuade her to accept a ride in my car. When she insisted she could make it on her own, I followed along behind her until she collapsed again at the next intersection. This time she accepted the ride but insisted on being dropped off at the public library where I gather they called an ambulance and sent her to the emergency room. A week later, I saw her swaying figure on the same path to the library and attempted to ask her how she fared after the incident. Disoriented and alarmed, she motioned me to stay away. Not only is the public in denial about the suffering, its own victims themselves are in denial; its least recognized aspect is the loneliness and disorientation of those isolated by the quarantine measures.
Giorgio Agamben was an outlier in asking what damage a society incurs in turning its back on its dying and its dead. He cited Antigoneand the account of the 17th-century plague in Milan in Manzoni’s great novel The Betrothed.One could cite the measures taken by Dr. Rieux and his associates in Camus’ The Plague.The measures are harsh and perhaps even ineffective against the epidemic, but the actions of those who take responsibility for their fellows assert human dignity and demonstrate to the afflicted community that it is not merely an anomic, cowed mass of victims each looking out for Number One. The measures enacted in most countries assumed that one would behave as if the latter were the case. You might reply that each of us looking out for Number One was the best way to protect the population as a whole. But was it? What if citizens had been mobilized to relieve or support the weak and the isolated? The only response demanded of us was to follow the dictates of the state. This is why in France so many of the young and liberal-minded adopted the opposite stance of American liberals by opposing mandatory quarantine and the pass sanitaire for entry into any public place. As Agamben observed, no clear measure of the threshold peril for limiting the liberties of citizens was negotiated and accepted and therefore no guarantee existed that the state of emergency could not be invoked arbitrarily or against manufactured threats such as “terrorism.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 