On September 14, 2001, good friends pulled me out of a lethargy induced by three days of trying to figure out what happened on the 11th.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
We went to the cinema which offered the fabulous destiny of Amelie Poulain. The perfect entertainment to forget, to resituate the human spirit. But nothing changed. 9/11 had taken place and changed our collective life forever.
However, many television series based on everyday life made no reference to it, did not change the plots. On the contrary, many artistic, architectural and other works marked the moment, immortalized, bogged down in our history, although it was only a day in human history.
We have also introduced the risk of terrorism into our lives, hoping, sometimes falsely, to force it into certain isolated regions.
What will we commemorate?
We are at two years of difficult march in the pandemic mud and the television offer has not, in its fictions, included the fact COVID-19. We see the staging efforts to distance the actors without it appearing, without a mask, without sanitary rules. For the purpose of entertainment, deemed essential by the authorities, it is as if this plague did not exist. Detective Lieutenant Simard has left District 31 without a hug from his colleagues to maintain the social distancing of the actors, without reference to the COVID-19. And the series will no doubt end without mentioning the pandemic. This is our new unspecified reality.
Tomorrow, March 11. Last year, after public calls for meditation, the government left the precincts of the National Assembly, and Prime Minister François Legault, the only one to speak, underlined for a few minutes the human losses.
That’s not all we lost. Our desire or our right to be together, to share, to socialize in the foreground.
I wonder what we will commemorate tomorrow, March 11, 2022, when in the minds of many, we will have lost two years of life, loved ones, a way of life. Even as we allowed our “essential cultural services” to continue to entertain without reference to the dramas related to COVID-19 that were spreading in civil society.
The pandemic is much more than an isolated event, with daily lives disrupted and more than 12,000 lives cut short, often in deplorable conditions by our collective negligence and management. Notwithstanding, we work to create while ignoring the pandemic, its deaths, its mourning, its disruption of social conventions. Yet art may well serve to translate what journalistic information does not show of pandemic life.
Isn’t this an echo of what we observe in civil society, with the constant calls to return to normal life, to let the economy get carried away, to magically think that the vaccine solves everything, to absolve for the errors that have increased the death toll and the load shedding in the health system?
Tomorrow, March 11, 2022, will we encourage oblivion to take precedence or will we allow a society that needs to reunite to express itself, far from the political discourse that will contaminate this election year? Civil society, and I’m talking about everyone, needs to stop to start again on a basis that is well aware of reality, ceasing to act as if nothing of the past two years had happened. Beyond the differences of opinion, we must find what the English call common ground.
Between dreams and realism
They are far in the history of Quebec, the moments during which new leaders stood up and inspired, relying on the lessons of the past to propose a vision of tomorrow that includes everyone. Politicians, animators and other public figures no longer know how to instil the collective spirit to invest individually and collectively for the end of the pandemic.
Certainly, the population is widely vaccinated and has generally respected the health instructions. But our daily life has moved away, like television fiction, from references to our persistent pandemic condition.
The discourse on the pandemic in the population has more “eager to get it over with” than “thoughts for the losses and the bereaved”. Fortunately, we still dared to be indignant during the inquest by coroner Géhane Kamel and the report by Quebec’s ombudsman, Marie Rinfret. But for how long ?
François Mitterrand, who had lost the French presidential election to General de Gaulle, feared excitement by declaring: “A policy that is limited to brewing dreams deceives them all. A policy that ignores them is mistaken about the nature of those it claims to lead. Are we at this type of moment in our collective history when we have to choose between the dreams of a society that wants to abstract itself from the COVID-19 episode or the realism of modulating dreams to a world that irreparably damaged?
Our entertainment should no longer be on the fringes of our lives with COVID-19. They should be combined with daily realities, to feel rather than simply measure the distress of caregivers, the pathological bereavement that afflicts many. We must put the production of feelings at the service of the collective spirit.
Concomitantly, it is also the duty of leaders and everyone to invest in our redefinition of dreams by concealing our simple desire to return to normal. Notably, our healthcare system has suffered too much to simply recover smoothly. Children have significant educational delays to catch up. And it is also illusory that the majority can entirely conduct all of their employment activities remotely.
Everyone’s demands currently seem enormous in our redefinition of tomorrow, testifying to an individualism that has taken over the investment felt at the start of the pandemic.
All in all, we can no longer act as if… The pandemic has killed, made a mess. Let us ask ourselves individually if we are ready to make some sacrifices to participate in the post-pandemic era, at a time when many professionals are leaving their profession or are thinking of doing so, when career choices are modulated by ease rather than by the desire to get involved.
This is a message that I would like to see settle and prevail. It is not science that will get us through what we hope will be the last milestones of the pandemic, it is a certain duty of self-sacrifice and reasoned hope. Unless some, I fear, only want to deny some representation of March 11, which enshrined global recognition of the pandemic…