Designer-editor and committed citizen, the author is president of the governing board of an elementary school. She has also taught literature at college and contributes to the magazine Quebec letters.
This sentence from a song by the Boulay Sisters lives in me as I try to decant these two (first, let’s not be fooled) years of the pandemic. Coming back from spring break with the family, we came across a “chain of freedom” in Quebec. On the edge of the 20, vans in single file, carriers of flags emptied of their senses and inflatable structures for children swarmed in the glow of the flashing lights, which ensured the smooth running of the demands. ” Freedom “, could we read in spray paint on a pickup.
“But what are they doing there? asked my ten-year-old daughter. There will even be more masks in a few weeks! ” In effect. But the anti are anti no matter which way the wind is blowing. And the more time passes, the deeper the trenches seem between conspirators and pro-science, individualists and collectivists. These days, I have the impression that there is no more varnish to scrape off to contemplate the ugliness brought to light by this pandemic, place of multiple divisions, elsewhere like here.
How did we get there ? Will living together now serve as fiction? What will be left of us after this interminable health crisis, the end of which is not up to us to decide? Would the situation have been different if our government had opted for more education and transparency?
The trap of oversimplification
The Legault government had its role to play in the scaffolding of tensions. Many praised the Coalition avenir Québec’s communications skills, but its performance was not flawless. When managing a pandemic, vagueness is the enemy of good…
There was the dithering around wearing a mask, the interval between the first two doses of vaccines, the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca injection, the need for a third dose, the time at which to administering it, the appropriateness of a booster dose after Omicron, holiday gatherings…
There has also been the unfortunate tendency to oversimplify: in other words, the government has often decided to take us for idiots, giving us confusing messages on ventilation, not explaining aerosol transmission, under- estimating our ability to properly wear a mask or face covering, by not lifting the veil on the modes of transmission and the risks associated with each environment (prohibiting people from seeing each other outside has never been useful on the epidemiological level and contributed to pandemic fatigue and sickness, social relations not being able to drop below a certain threshold).
Finally, there were the lies: those surrounding the CO testing protocol2 in the schools, those about the justification of the curfew, those told to Coroner Kamel; lies too often accompanied by “loss of memory” or completely redacted documents, the same black as our confined thoughts.
These missteps, taken in isolation, could have been forgotten. But, put end to end, they ended up creating a gaping breach into which the conspirators sank until they lost all confidence in this government… like those who, at the other end of the spectrum, accuse him of not following science.
The mask as a symbol
The gap seems difficult to bridge today, especially since the government’s discourse has once again bifurcated: the recent relaxations, while the positivity rate is still high and there are still around twenty deaths per day, now give ammunition to conspiracy theorists who believe that everyone else is a prisoner of the government “narrative”. The collective immunity strategy (utopian, according to some specialists), never named as such, positions the virus as being “benign”. Mild.
When asked at a press briefing if he was going to continue to wear the mask, Doctor Luc Boileau thus took out his pair of skates for the big days and replied “to go diving”. A joke that was intended to be sympathetic (and the rest of his answer was certainly nuanced), but the damage was done: the people who will keep the mask are now more at risk of being ostracized, already “alarmist” and “crazy” than they are in the eyes of the conveyors of freedom who cry out for the sanitary dictatorship.
While it should have been presented to us as an ally, which allows us to protect ourselves and also to protect others while living almost normally, the mask has thus become the symbol of sacrificed freedoms. Conspiracy theorists and government, for different reasons, are now converging on the same discourse. With the elections approaching, we have to bestow, somehow, an aura of normality in our daily lives. The uncovered faces are essential to let us believe that all that is behind us, that the life of before has resumed, with its offices in the city center once again occupied by workers who will go for a drink after the 4 p.m. meeting.
Since risk management is now individual, some people will not understand why others want to continue to protect themselves and those around them, immunosuppression, autoimmune syndromes and orphan diseases not being pinned on the reverse of our coats. Yet, if people are lucky enough to escape it, others will continue to get sick. Some and some (especially some) – at least 10% – will develop long-lasting COVID that will rob them, perhaps forever, of their former life, taking with it their cognitive abilities, according to recent studies.
What will be left of us after all this, then? It’s hard to say… But what is certain is that by playing this not always consensual COVID-lottery, some people will lose more than others. Let’s not forget them.