Did the panic around toilet paper at the very beginning of the pandemic foreshadow how much we were going to be pissed off in the years to come?
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
This was the first absurd shortage, when it was realized that it was caused by the Anxieties storing scrolls, rather than non-perishable food as true survivalists do.
Since then, the shortages have multiplied. From baby milk to the second-hand cars that are being snapped up, passing through the tragedy of the disappearance of affordable housing, without forgetting the most important: the labor shortage, which is weakening the entire system and creating the chaos at airports and passport offices. All against a backdrop of inflation and the risk of recession.
Do you feel the return of life after the pandemic? It limps and it stumbles, this life, but it resumes – and unsurprisingly, so does the pandemic. Me, I swear to you, I do everything to feel “back”. To hell with the mask, enweille the shows in closed places, I even started to kiss again, but there are so many people around me who have caught the virus in recent days that I have decided to put it off until my holidays, that I I do not want to pass on the tile.
To paraphrase Michèle Richard about the show garden party : life, it has to go on. Thousands of older people have died of COVID-19, all the more easily forgotten because we may never have stopped caring. I would be surprised if care improved in CHSLDs with the labor shortage. As for autonomous seniors, if they haven’t had the chance to be owners, we no longer hesitate to evict them to renovate their apartments and rent them for more.
I feel a little disoriented, like Mathieu Bélisle who has just released the very nice essay What dies in us, containing his thoughts on the pandemic and our denial of death. “The cult of efficiency and productivity, the appetite for speed and acceleration have led us to consider the Earth as an immense altar where all that lives must be relentlessly destroyed, spent, sacrificed until the consumption of all things, until the death of death,” he wrote. “In such a regime, the fault no longer lies, as in the past, in the fact of desiring too much, or else of nurturing forbidden desires, but in the fact of not desiring enough, or not quickly enough, of not be sufficiently desirable. »
We are perhaps short of desires, by dint of being stuffed with them.
My summer plan remains the same as in recent years: in the countryside, growing my outdoor and indoor garden. I already hated traveling in high season, and seeing the mess in the airports, I’m happy with my choice, even if I want to leave everything to go anywhere, even to the flattest places on the planet , only to not be with us anymore. To be honest with you, I quietly bid farewell to the trip. It was probably the thing I loved the most in the world, and the activity that put me in the most debt of my life.
It may have been only an episode in human history, those crowds of people from rich countries who jump on planes for short stays while for the rest of the planet the only trip that exists is the ‘exile.
I would have known in my life this time when we accompanied my grandparents to the airport when they left for Acapulco, because flying was an event, and then the discount plane tickets that allowed a getaway accessible to all budgets. But that time is coming to an end.
Above all, it makes no sense to burn the last oil reserves like mad, in the midst of global warming which promises to be even more serious than the most pessimistic scenarios of yesterday’s ecologists. I think we will return to the pre-mass tourism world one day, not out of responsibility, but because we will no longer have a choice. We will travel as at the beginning of the XXe century, once or twice in a lifetime, in a long initiatory stay, rather than a week in an all-inclusive.
I have the impression that subconsciously, people have guessed what is coming and that they want to enjoy the last moments of this world before, hence the explosion in demand for passports. This reminds me of a small essay that strongly marked me, in 2018: The evil that comes by Pierre-Henri Castel. This trained psychoanalyst explores the possibility of human malfeasance from the very real perspective of ecological collapse. “The more the end will be certain, therefore near, the more the last enjoyment that will remain for us will be the enjoyment of Evil. Instead of passively witnessing, generation after generation, the disappearance of all that was good, and which until now made sense, and then no doubt not only the disappearance of the generations themselves, but of the last individuals who compose, I hypothesize that, among the last men, some will transform this grim decline into an ecstatic intoxication of destruction. Who will stop them? And above all, in the name of what to prevent them from transfiguring into a dazzling Evil what was in any case only sadly destined to get worse? The nearer the end, then, the more passionately humanity will find the sources of excitement necessary to live in excessive, atrocious, insane actions. »
The war in Ukraine is probably a good example of this, which no longer makes the headlines, after having suppressed the other wars in the news.
I think we lack prudence, compassion, vision and sense more than anything else.
Fireworks and festivals are back in my neighborhood. Despite its orange cones, the city of Montreal is so beautiful filled with its people strolling, its bursts of laughter between friends that I hear on balconies and terraces. More than ever this year, every little patch of land, every balcony, roof or sidewalk space is occupied by plants, flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruits. Looks like urban agriculture has taken hold and is here to stay. Everything that grows inside this asphalt that makes us suffocate during heat waves has symbolic and promising value for me. I am convinced to the very depths of my being that we will succeed in getting through the ecological and economic crisis if everyone takes care of their little piece of territory and their community, if we act in the immediate reality around us, rather than want to change the world of his living room by yelling at each other on social networks. In any case, it is certainly not with Airbnb that we will get there.
I wish you a very nice summer, despite everything that hangs over our noses.