I suppose I’ve been in a stupor. These gossamer days—where have I been? I feel disembodied, missing. At first the news was sort of thrilling—God, could it be as dire as they’re predicting? But the novelty was fleeting. Life began to wear the patina of a dream, where the drab familiar is suddenly skewed, made sinister. “Stay home!” they insisted. They can’t be serious, can they? In a blink everything was consumed by this invisible Leviathan—an invisible foe woven into an invisible web of diktat and paranoia. But of course you know this. We are, all of us, subjects of a new regime.
It takes plans and ambitions and renders them moot. It plants doubts where hopes once grew like weeds. It enshrines fear and rewards cowardice. Each day is unfinished, somehow slight. A run-on sentence, punctuated by stiff drinks and walks. Fridays come like widgets down the line, ceaselessly, undifferentiated. I dream of long days at work, backbreaking work, and shaking hands with strangers.
The religion of Safety is nothing new. Its evangelists rail against cars, against alcohol, cigarettes, guns, football, any combination thereof. They remained on the seaboard when America lurched westward. They probably mocked the space shuttle program. And today is, surely, their heyday. Care is the pretense, but it is really a religion of control, an impulse that crawled out of the muck with us and has evolved in tandem with our bodies and institutions into a perverse complexity. It positively oozes from television sets.
If your government has burdened you with overzealous limitations, you must live “as if.” The peoples of Occupied Europe knew this. Speaking of misfortune, Czeslaw Milosz reasoned, “Since we must live with it, what remains is a choice of tactics.” We can submit or, as he analogizes, “wall it off with wax” like a hive of bees and soldier on. “You do not have a clear conscience, because perhaps you are supposed to dedicate all your efforts and all your attention to it.” This would be the way of the apostles of Safety. “And all you can say,” argues Milosz, “in your own defense is, ‘I want to live.'”
I find it difficult to think much of anything beyond the scope of the moment, don’t you? I resent this kind of tunnel vision. I resent the fear that eats me into such a state. And the people who have allied with it to neuter my aspirations, dim my light, treat us as subjects—I resent you the most. May you run out of toilet paper.
Impolitic 