Going back to where we have been for the past few years: here is all that, it seems, the expectations of the post-pandemic boil down to, not only for those who demonstrate against sanitary measures, but also for all the others , who patiently hope for the end, each in their own corner.
Ah, if only life could go back to the way it was!
How many times have you heard this?
It’s as if we had come to believe that our past condition had something to excite us about… Honestly, were we all that good? This narrow vision of the immediate future, which asks only to retake the narrow path of the past, is this really the only path we have found to lead us towards greater freedom?
For years, in an arrogant display of good conscience and self-righteousness, the ruling class has been enjoining the people to believe that all their problems are primarily individual and cultural, rather than collective and material. For the consequences of this pandemic, this principle of every man for himself appears on the eve of being set up, once again, as a model of universal solution.
It is clear that the culture of collective organization has collapsed, to the delight of all those who benefit from exacerbated divisions. Take a look at how you are treated.
Do you have recurring financial worries because your salary is too low? You are inculcated, by a learned bludgeon, to learn how to save rather than claim a higher salary.
Does your job stress you out because the pace and demands have continued to grow? Appreciate the delicacy of your employer, who, far from changing this situation, strives to convince you to learn how to tolerate it better. Be more flexible, more open, more apt to deposit yourself in the new forms of a reinventing company, in the glory of changes whose ins and outs are never discussed. Come on, don’t be a jerk! Your employer makes an effort. He even enlisted the services of renowned consulting firms to teach you, at lunchtime, the ways to better manage your tensions, without however finding it good to call into question the foundations of your condition. Who would dare speak of alienation in the face of so much goodwill explaining to you that you have to admit that times have changed? Learn to behave better, to be in phase with generalized precariousness, deregulation and decentralization at all costs.
It’s basically the same with the pandemic. This crisis is not yet over that, already, it is suggested to you to carry the rest on your shoulders. So learn to live with the virus! Here is the watchword that begins to be serenaded. This will be done at the expense of the state, which will continue, as before, to confuse social institutions with Toyota assembly lines and common culture with mass consumption. In Quebec, this leads to the defense, tooth and nail, of an unlikely automobile connection with Lévis. For a few billion dollars to be paid by future generations, the real conditions of everyone’s existence will remain strictly unchanged. In Montreal, you can travel on the REM, along an axis that will at most double that of an existing metro, the route of which has long been deemed insufficient. The REM will allow Montrealers to live again and again in the midst of an ugliness that is all the more absurd for being futile. For the regions, provided you wait, the Internet will eventually reach the end of your rank. As the villages empty, the Internet arrives. Is there not something to sing about the advance of such progress?
The call to order launched against the “freedom convoys” and other excesses finds its counterpart in this generalized disorder induced by the ruling class in the social and political system. Inflation can roar, health services crumble, education collapse just like school buildings, our environment breaks up, citizens find themselves mobilized in a struggle… against pandemic control measures!
Why does a whole popular world sacrifice its life so that a handful of powerful people can continue to derive the greatest benefit from it? Why does our society appear to demand so little of the future, in an apparently obstinate refusal to take a critical look at the excesses of capitalism?
Is our way of reading the world so perverted by the ideology of laissez-faire that we claim and congratulate ourselves, even in terms of public health, on being left to our own devices? A clique of opportunistic politicians in any case uses people who believe it as a stepping stone to raise their ambitions. By cultivating a reactionary mythology before their eyes, a large part of the population finds itself on the floor, by dint of being thus encouraged to choose the most masochistic policies.
Our society has become accustomed to obeying the idea that it had to give up and let the managers who recommend it to become fragmented, to be malleable, not to question the advantageous taxation of the powerful , meager social security measures, deficient environmental regulations, unstructured medical services, little attention given to the elderly, the weakness of the education network. When it is such precariousness that is confused with freedom, there is something twisted that no longer works.
This society lacks fresh air as much as the miserable schools attended by its children. Quickly open the windows.