Here is a powerful and honest piece of writing about living with long haul Covid. I’m curious how many of my friends and readers have also had these experiences. So far, touch wood, I haven’t had the illness yet. But even typing “yet“ worries me a little. I do however think that there is something collective in the symptoms that Maria Farrell describes in this essay. It is as if the virus doesn’t only infect us individually but also our collective consciousness and will too:
“There’s no steady state. Covid is coming for all of us and each time it’s a roll of the dice. I’ve had it twice now. The first time knocked me out for about six months, and the second time did sharply alien and unpleasant things to my brain. I’m so scared that collectively all our brains are getting fucked, and we won’t be able to sustain concentration in the immersive and demanding story-webs I believe are necessary to keep imagining our large and interlinked society into existence. I worry people like me will succumb to premature dementias as a result of the brain damage we’ve incurred, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And there are so many of us. And all of it just as our institutions are self-destructing and we need amplified and deep-form subjectivity to solve planetary-level hard problems.”
–Maria Farrell.
In this sense I don’t think it matters if we’ve contracted Covid once or twice or not at all. The virus has changed the way we live and has created a timeline we can never retreat from.
I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.
Óscar Romero, The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, compiled and translated by James R. Brockman (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 200.
Canada is not irredeemable as an idea. As a country founded on nation-to-nation treaty relationships in which existing Indigenous governance exists alongside common law, it is indeed possible to create a place in the world in that transforms a colonial legacy into a relational future. Canada founded on a vision that was exclusionary at the outset, and yet, the bones are there for it to be a place that is structurally inclusive and equitable.
I don’t apologize for my idealism about what we are led to by the north star of a far off post-colonial world. It guides my view and decisions about justice and about responsibilities that we have as settlers in Canada. Canada is poised to be a leader in so many ways but it must address the deep structural roots of its violence in greed and exploitation, a root that is the basis of every colonial country in this hemisphere. We need to reconcile first with the reality that the country was founded on broken agreements, stolen lands and genocide. Beginning there illuminates the places where structural violence still finds it’s source.
These territories on which the idea of “Canada” has been founded are beautiful, rich, life giving places which colonization sees as resources to be exploited, stolen, depleted and sold with no regard for the legacy of those actions on the natural environments or the people for whom these places are deepest home. Our work, if we are to redeem Canada, s to heed to Romero’s call and dig deep into our mess to find a source of peace for the common good that flows from justice, equity and restoration of reciprocal relationships between the land and peoples that have paid the price for the benefits many are celebrating today.
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