The pandemic 24.5.21
The pandemic: our stories, our purpose, nature’s cry and our response.
The thinking that governs the approach to ‘politics’ within the frame of reference adopted in this web site seeks to apply itself also to the pandemic:
‘How do we find a response which is of the nature of the problem, seeks to determine itself through immersion in,
rather than alienation from that, is measured, sensible and responsible rather than avoidant, extreme or reckless and seeks to be inclusive of everything and everyone including the likely origin of the virus in general if not yet specifically known.’ Also, with regards to what it seems to be both telling us and asking of us how we can develop ourselves both individually and as community in how we respond to it.
Each response will be an act of individual freedom, bearing in mind all the resources available and how we seek to apply them or not, in how they serve the interests of nature, the environment and our fellow creatures as well as ourselves and how we seek to live our lives, and frame our decisions in this context. This may then include considerations of what nature itself is trying to achieve for itself and ourselves in and through this pandemic, the ‘reset’ or rebalancing it is or may be seeking to accomplish and how we participate in that. This may then have a bearing on how well or badly we prepare ourselves to ‘build back better’ and help to shape and inform the ‘new normal’; how we respond appropriately and proportionately and best equip ourselves for the task in hand.
I have attempted to do just this in what I have written in the piece entitled ‘Responsibility and the Vaccine’ especially the first part of that which looks at my own personal decision and how I arrived at it. There is then the political background to this but perhaps those considerations should be secondary rather than primary in our own thinking and decision making; should be in the background rather than the foreground. All in all, it’s how we arrive at our own decision that counts.
Again, it is in accordance with the whole approach to the world’s problems and opportunities that we encourage each other to share our personal perspectives and experiences. In that spirit I would like to invite you to E mail to me your own story in relation to this so that we can have potentially a range of decisions and individual acts of responsibility represented, not just a few lines of response we may feel we have been more or less herded into. So this could be your space to share your own process, the nature of your engagement and its result and so repopulate with personal, individual stories an area which may have become a little too collective.
We are all individuals, at the end of the day, who live in a shared world both naturally, socially and in other ways. As such we have responsibilities to ourselves to others and to the world at large. As our decision is unique, so should it be universally accepted, however much we may also want to offer another perspective.
So please do feel at liberty to share your stories. E mail them to me and when they are uploaded on to the web site they will be anonymised.
This is already a form of publication but a friend may be interested in gathering and curating these stories for publication more widely, perhaps in a book or in magazine form. She would then contact you individually at the e-mail address from which you have sent it, to obtain your consent and deal with any other matters of relevance.
Our response to everything is crucial; our reference to our environmental context - human, social and economic and as well as natural - equally so. This is what makes everything in this sense ‘political’.
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