Arundhati Roy

My wonderful sister-in-law, Tammy, sent me the following:

Here is a quote from article by Arundhati Roy, author of one of my favourite books “The God of Very Small Things:

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.

Article source: https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

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My response:

Great article, Tam, thank you.

I've felt for a long time that our culture and country are disintegrating. I'm not a pessimist by nature, but it seems to me that the ravages and likely trajectory of modern—and made in USA—capitalism, along with the decades-long rise of the political right not as a popular movement but as a potent political force, pretty much guarantee that we are going to destroy ourselves at least culturally, politically, economically if not quite physically. I feel that there is only so much inequality and injustice and hypocrisy that a culture can contain, and as those characteristics keep increasing—as they have in the US for decades—eventually the reckoning comes. I have no idea what form it will take.

So I'm in absolute agreement with the author's diagnosis for what has happened leading up to now.

I am, however, not at all convinced that the corona virus situation is going to bring us to our senses, or result in any "new thinking" on anything. My outlook is grim.

Nonetheless, I'm sharing with you this "inspirational poster" that a friend posted on Facebook. Let's hope I'm wrong.