When the fires came, we stood side by side and fought them, together. Fires aren’t rational or irrational things you can talk to – the heat and obliteration of flame is utterly Other. Throughout the black summer of 2019, fire ravaged through the Australian bush, crushing homes, schools, pubs, buckling street signs, crushing corrugated iron fences, swallowing rosellas, wallabies, quolls, lyre birds, koalas – nameless, unnumbered animals.
Not unnumbered. But three billion animals are just too many to comprehend.
When the fires came, they were out there. External. And we stood side by side, and fought them, together. Volunteers drove through infernos scooping people up, hacking them out of their houses, running with hoses – every human life dragged, blackened, but spluttering, out of the smoke was a precious triumph. Volunteers scrambled to run soup kitchens, fundraisers, help families sort through their charred houses to find useful things like saucepans and crockery amid the broken remains of lounges, kitchen benches, children’s beds and the inevitable filthy teddy. People wrote songs about it, poems, flash fiction, articles, did radio programs, interviews, the whole country held each other’s hands, teams in offices staring tensely at the wind map, bosses watching, nodding quietly, go home, sort your stuff, get out. Doing a whip round, checking in, making calls.
When the fires came, they were out there. And we stood, together.
But when the pandemic came, the big, unreasoned animal was not out there anymore. It was inside. It was in us. Or it might have been. And that was the worst thing – those people that had helped you before could now be carrying something deep inside them that could hurt you – could kill you. And they might not even know. They might have already passed it on, maybe to you – and maybe, before you even knew, you’d passed it on to someone that wouldn’t survive it. To someone that would struggle for breath, like they were choking in the thick smoke of the Australian bushfires, and would gasp to ask the doctors when they could see their family again, and the doctors would press their lips tight together and not answer.
It wasn’t out there anymore. It was inside. And you couldn’t tell.
And I wonder, now when I think back at everything that’s happened since, if that recognition has had a lasting impact. We tried to band together, smiling and waving vigorously across parks, baking banana breads and leaving them on doorsteps, painting rainbows on our windows. But in the end, as Emma Maitlis pointed out, we’re not all in this together. And when it came right down to it, we wasted our generation’s great Blitz moment fighting over toilet paper.
Because in the end, we put our families first. We were afraid. We justified our actions in terms of prioritising the safety of those we love. And here was the real harm. We talked endlessly at the time about the impact of isolation, loneliness, the impending mental health crisis which, nonetheless, is all true. But it wasn’t just that. It was the survivalist need to look at your fellow human being, and then to be suspicious of them. They might have it. They are a threat. The Big Thing is in them, inside, not out there. You could walk past someone, look at them, take in their face, their hair, the way they wear their t-shirt, how they hold their legs when they walk, what they look at as they pass you, and instead of adding all those things up to build a person, a life, with all the little things they’re afraid of, their memories of family holidays, school trips, what their best friend told them last week, what they’re hoping for today; instead, we could look at them and see just a threat.
It has corrupted us. And even more so the faint, background awareness that we might be harbouring disease – the Bad Thing – in ourselves. We might not know it, or be affected in ourselves by it, but it gets out of us, and hurts other people. This is now built into us every time we see another person and are suspicious of them, make judgements about them, try to assess their threat.
And then go and set a Lush on fire.
Austerity has driven increasing poverty in this country. Lack of housing, the cost of living, inadequate services have driven despair, and the despairing are fed someone to blame by cynical actors. There is plenty to be angry about in the UK in 2024. But let’s be clear on the difference between protest and riot, between anger and violence. The riots in the UK this week are, without question, racist acts, anger misdirected at a group of people, all who have been pre-judged based on incorrect, ignorant assumptions. That is prejudice.
And at the root of it all, perhaps, is this dug-in habit we now have, this convention of thought – other people are threats. The Bad Thing is not Out There, in front of us who are standing before it, side by side. It is in him. And her. Them. Maybe ourselves. So be suspicious. Do not trust, do not reach out, do not seek to understand, to learn, to grow. The Bad Thing is inside. Suspect everyone. Turn your back.
Close your door.
Alone.