How to treat a side effect of the COVID-19 Virus — Anger
A few days ago, the director of the UN Environment Programme said coronavirus is sending us a message, which I think is both true, and fundamentally mistaken. Or at least, the way it’s being reported and discussed is.
We are all of us just bits of nature, containing nature, and living within nature. We may talk of ‘unnatural’ things, but we have no experience of anything else. So it’s a mistake not to see a message from coronavirus as a message from the web of life to itself — this is a message from within, not a message from someplace else.
That would explain why the pandemic siege of COVID-19 has set the world wide web alight with a shared focus like we’ve never seen before. A kind of intense fever fervour, gripping global attention as we’re all overpowered by the same fears for our health. Oddly, it seems we needed to be taught the lesson that life itself is our highest purpose — not because we didn’t realise life is precious, but because our lives aren’t organised to serve life.
But what else could this coronavirus be inviting us to learn? What could be it’s message from within?
Last week, I read a piece called ‘This is how your immune system reacts to the corona virus’ by Dana G Smith, which explains why some people only get mild symptoms, where for others, it can be fatal. If you’re in danger, the worst thing you can do is panic — and that’s exactly what the body’s doing when the auto-immune response goes into a frantic stage of overdrive. The attempted cure becomes the problem, as one part of the internal defense system starts lashing out at the rest of the team. The defenders stop aiming their fire and cause so much collateral damage that the battle is lost for all.
It is our own response that’s devastating. COVID-19 has another message for us all right, and it’s this.
Handle anger with care.
Emotions are another form of response, and anger is the juice that fires up our body to attack things we feel threatened by. It’s a good and useful emotion when it’s under control, but if the red mist descends and all we can see is enraging, it will eat us up from the inside. Unchecked, anger burns up our social web, sowing discord and destroying communities. As the world wide web bubbles with news of inspiration, hope, caring and sharing, it may not be clear that anger is close to the surface right now, ready to arm us for action.
That’s a good thing, because there’s going to be a job to do, but it’s also a dangerous thing, because it could so easily be misdirected.
A friend of mine lives on Arran, where 23% of the homes are holiday or second homes. Some of the locals there are really angry with second home owners who have arrived. This pattern repeats everywhere, here and abroad, so they’re not the only ones. On one hand, it seems perfectly reasonable for people who can, to run away from the higher risk of a densely packed city to their rural retreats. If they go in the early stage before a lockdown, most of them will probably be well. Provided there’s enough medical care on tap where they’re headed, and they take care to minimise risk to locals, this should be fine. On the other hand, some will be ticking with the undetected virus waiting to go off, and it’s equally reasonable to be fearful and angry.
And here’s my key message. The anger will be needed, but if we direct it at each other for trying to save ourselves, then the social web that sustains our society is in big trouble. We need to direct our anger with careful restraint, not at ourselves, but at those promoting behaviour that does not serve life.
Right now, all the caring services — healthcare, environmental care and social care — are in the driving seat. These are the things that serve our lives best, and we’re finding ways to pay for them. As this pandemic wanes, we will be feeling quite desperate to get back to what we know — which is earning a living so we can enjoy good lives. But a return to the ‘normal’ of recent years would ruin us. That ‘normal’ makes us all servants to finance, when it should be the other way around.
I think we should be angry — very, very angry — with the system that celebrates ‘everything except that which makes life worthwhile’ as Bobby Kennedy put it so poetically in 1968. But COVID-19 is warning us not to let our anger get out of control.
We need to use our anger to fight off the Viral Economy, a nasty infection that doesn’t play by the rules of life. What we mustn’t do, is get so angry that we seek to destroy the people promoting it, that way we all lose. We simply have to outplay them with a better system.
Fortunately, the body of society has already designed a Wellbeing Economy, so let’s raise the next generation on that.
Image by Peter Linforth from Pixabay
