The Same but Different Sky

The sun is rising and the sky is clear. Clear just like the skies in our first lockdown. But I’m not waking up to blue because it’s January and its black at 7am. I definitely feel a year older and it seems to me that many of us feel like we’ve been through a learning experience. Yet many would have to say our government has learned nothing.

I’ve read that dolphins in Venice was made up but that doesn’t really matter because there were definitely instances of nature making hay while the sun shone. It makes me wonder, had we got the Coronavirus under control last year, would everything have gone back to something like normal. We would have wasted any opportunity to make significant changes. In some ways nothing changed because the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, continuing the trend of the last 40 years.

The nature of the virus, the nature of our political system and human nature have combined to return us to where we started and maybe we are in a better position now to determine our future. The nightingale show hospitals have gone. The 12 week turnaround promised last March was so patently ridiculous that such promises are not even being hinted at now. The suspended belief of last year is reduced to a stoic reluctance and everyone is being forced to face up to the truth that the cavalry is not coming.

Reality is always the best place to start and that is a lesson Covid-19 is teaching us. The virus holds no malice and has nothing to prove. If only the epidemiologists had been listened to we’d have done much better. But politics is not that much interested in truth, its first priority is self preservation, just like the virus. Like a thriller with a twist it will turn out that it was politics that killed so many — the virus merely being an agent.

While this might sound depressing (and it is) it gives me some hope. Life in black and white is neither comforting nor pleasant yet its only when the contrasts stand out (rather than being obfuscated in subtle hues) that the options are clear. Tinkering at the edges won’t cut it in 2021. In trying to save the NHS from collapsing in 2020 its been pushed nearer to the edge. That’s because it was a PR exercise rather than a genuine effort to fix anything. However the government tries to turn this around, its irresistable drive to increasingly privatise will be its undoing. The parasite that drives the government must eventually consume it’s host.

It could well be that Brexit and Covid-19 will ultimately turn this nation round and save it from sinking in the North Sea. Tragically it will have taken hundreds of thousands of lives in the process. That wasn’t inevitable but is depressingly familiar. We’ve been led to believe we live in an era of liberty and enlightenment, far removed from the bleak but transformative 19th century and the early years of the last century. We look back at the great wars which we are told bought us freedom yet were the sandbox of the military industrial complex.

There is nothing new under the sun. We live under the same but different sky.