Nowtopian

While I may be sick of wall-to-wall coronavirus in the media, and we’re all a bit stir-crazy with the physical distancing and staying home, I’m NOT sick of this luminous, sensuous, expansive, amazing HALT that we’re living through now. I’m cautiously excited about the profound crisis of legitimacy this pandemic is inducing in our already brittle, exhausted, and criminally insane society. After weeks of imagining how different life can be, and seeing the amazing resurgence of turtles on a beach on the east coast of India, crocodiles on the beaches of Oaxaca, Mexico, and countless other regenerations and reappearances, and sharing the clean air and sparkling views we now have every day, who hasn’t stopped to ponder the possibilities of NOT going back to “normal”? I’ve argued for decades that life could be SO wonderful, SO much better than the pathetic charade we have been imprisoned in until now. But we had to stop working, stop producing that world, and after a healthy break to think about it, start producing the world we want to live in. Maybe the sudden devaluation of shopping, celebrity, and spectacle has enriched our lives and opened our senses to overlooked possibilities? Did we inadvertently stop and smell the roses?

My mind wanders these days, even as I try to focus on one theme or another. Public health, pandemic disease, bird flu, ornithology, speculative fabulism and science facts, medicine and authority, and on and on. I’ve been reading a lot about public health, and even dived (dove?) into the history of epidemic disease here in San Francisco thanks to City of Plagues by Susan Craddock. In it, she shows how poor people were harshly pathologized in 19th century San Francisco, getting blamed for getting sick (since their poverty was a result of their poor character, not an unequal social division of wealth). San Francisco’s white workers directed their frustration and racist wrath at the Chinese almost from the beginnings of statehood, and recurring smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, diphtheria, and other disease outbreaks were repeatedly blamed on Chinese. Public health officials took advantage of this prevailing logic to invade Chinatown on missions to “clean it up,” leading most dramatically between March and October 1903 to the destruction of 160 buildings and the eviction of 70 more in the small neighborhood during a bubonic plague eruption. No studies were ever done on the health effects of repeated use of chlorinated lime, carbolic acid, bichloride of mercury, and other noxious substances during these “clean-up” campaigns. After the 1906 earthquake, the devastated city was overrun by hundreds of thousands of rats, and it was finally understood that fleas on rats were the source of bubonic plague. Chinatown, was one of only three districts that did not have a plague problem since the neighborhood had already been rebuilt and sanitized. The rest of the City went on a rat-killing frenzy, and also began pouring cement where wooden floorboards had been in basements and back yards. Dr. Rupert Blue, the city’s Health Commissioner, said, “The disease [was being] built out of existence. This is the hope of San Francisco and in time that city will be one block of concrete throughout.” It was this same post-quake campaign that led to the removal of chicken coops, horse stables, and all domestic livestock from San Francisco. A decade later, the 1918 flu ripped through San Francisco twice, even inspiring a public revolt against wearing masks, before being largely forgotten until Covid-19 refreshed our memories.

The bizarre reality we are living through, when history has suddenly jumped up and seized us all by the throats (or lungs for the unlucky ones already sick), has led to a rapid reconsideration of what is important. For most people, family and friends and the vital connections we have with the people we care about, has moved front and center. Considering what we really need has been an unexpected bonus to this enforced staying-home. Seems toilet paper is very high on the list for a lot of folks, but more broadly, access to food, electricity, and communications has taken on central importance. Care provision, whether by front-line medical workers, or the legions of low-wage workers who had been toiling unappreciated in skilled nursing facilities or childcare centers, also looms large as a basic necessity, elevated by this crisis. Whatever follows this economic shutdown, the folks who provide care for our elders and children may finally gain some long overdue recognition for their essential work. And the ongoing scandalous neglect of people in elder care situations—warehouses for the aged—run by for-profit monsters who exploit their workforces, and provide the bare minimum of comfort and service for their “clients,” may finally be revealed in its naked brutality. And changed forever?