Daniel Thwaites | Learning from coronavirus

Life won’t quite be the same after this coronavirus pandemic. As the gloom of social isolation and quarantine descends, we need to think carefully about its impact on our domestic lives, employment, and so on. Another time, we can look at how it is altering geopolitics and shaking settled institutions.

The news coming out from China hasn’t been wholly uplifting on the domestic front. All the treacly messages about enjoying time with the family won’t undercut Freud’s most basic insight that it is the productive garden of our neuroses and pathologies.

The New Yorker reports: “In Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, more than ten million people were placed under lockdown. When restrictions were eased, earlier this month, the city’s divorce rate spiked.”

Really, this ought to come as no surprise. One of the worst things you could do to a happily married couple is make them spend time around each other.

Now, those of us who maintain, contra the ruling liberal and libertarian myths, that the State has a direct interest in the acculturation and support of healthy family life know that the Government should probably have issued warnings against talking too much to one’s spouse (or long-term partner) in the interest of domestic harmony. Have governments been doing that? No. It’s negligence.

Anyway, on top of the close physical proximity, this diabolical virus has caused the cancellation of so many sporting fixtures, which makes things even more hazardous. The likelihood is that without the distraction of sports, people will begin to communicate. There is no good outcome to this kind of flirtation with danger.

In other words, expect separation and divorce rates to spike worldwide after all this “social isolation”, “shelter at home”, and “self-quarantine” has run it’s deadly course across the globe.

The school closures due to the pandemic have introduced their own unique challenges. With school out, its true purpose of warehousing children so that adults can go to work comes into sharp focus. The pickney dem driving parents mad.

One Kingston 6 parent I know has had to grudgingly concede that her child is a nudist because he strips bare whenever there’s a break in the homeschooling. Had it not been for coronavirus, she would never have uncovered this important information and been able to kickstart prophylactic measures to contain him.

The ‘leggobeasts’

Many others are grudgingly admitting that the teachers weren’t just complaining because “dem don’t like mi pickney” because the fact is that nobody could “like di pickney”. I believe the technical term in the Jamaican social and psychological literature for this phenomenon is “leggobeast” although we are unsure about whether we want to accept the full implications.

All the same, there have been multiple confessions about parents finally realising the fortitude and stamina of teachers, and I’m just talking about in my immediate family.

But it raises a wider point with a more general application. Fact is that it’s not just the teachers who have been sorely underappreciated. As a rule, the people who do the most valuable work aren’t the ones who we thought and aren’t the ones who usually get the commendations and praises.

I don’t mean to disparage the army of clerks, paper-pushers, and pencil-sharpeners that make up the majority of the workforce by saying that they mostly spend their time wasting time. But actually, that’s exactly what I’m saying. We know that most of what is called “work” is just bullshit.

Still, bullshit is important because it gives people jobs. Some people produce it, and others have to be there to respond to it. And it’s important to note that it comes in various varieties, and that good BS is vastly superior to bad one. Usually, when the economy is purring along more or less well, we don’t have to draw these distinctions too clearly, but when things get serious, we have to point out the obvious.

It turns out that nurses, doctors, and policemen are the essential workers even though they generally get paid badly and work under substandard conditions. This invisible virus forces us to think about life without them, and it wouldn’t be pleasant.

Meanwhile lawyers, accountants, politicians, public relations consultants, media talking-heads, telemarketers, consultants, brand managers, and countless administrative specialists are generally highly respected but really produce nothing but more of it. Meaning, society would probably be a better place if they all went home and ate a few mangoes in a hammock.

Most essential workers

Then there are the most essential workers of all, the janitors and maids who spend their days disinfecting the nasty places, cleaning toilets and bathrooms, removing the debris that we thoughtlessly and carelessly create, and preparing the spaces we live in so that they are basically habitable. Typically, people don’t even remember that these heroes exist. Well, the coronavirus ought to be changing all that.

I shouldn’t say that there is not recognition of their importance. It’s more like their importance is systematically downplayed. But when things get serious, it’s an open secret. For example, often, when an uptown couple is in the throes of separation, the primary issue of contention is who will get to “keep” the ace helper. This is an issue that can turn an otherwise friendly separation into a desperately bitter divorce.

I know of one case where the gentleman departing the matrimonial home wept bitterly, not because the twenty-year relationship was ending, but because he was leaving behind the helper’s stew chicken.

So much more could be said, but alas, I’m running out of space. All the same, because we are the MOST creative and inventive people, it would be a crying shame to leave this topic without noting that parts of the workforce who at least consider themselves essential are also feeling the impact of this Wuhan virus.

The STAR ran a story entitled “Sex Workers say COVID-19 hurting business” that has been bouncing across the globe. At the relevant part, the “Back Road” worker advised the journalist that “she has been avoiding ‘tightly knit’ sex positions to avoid catching the virus”. Further along in the story we learn that “another worker said that she bathes and washes her hands regularly”.

Obviously, Minister Tufton’s message that people need to take special care about hygiene is filtering through into every nook and cranny of our blessed island. But equally obviously, some of the details are being reinterpreted as commerce requires. Some things even the Wuhan virus can’t change.

- Daniel Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.