Stories my father told me

Perhaps I’m getting old. After all, this will almost certainly be the last thing I write as an under-50. But one of the many unexpected consequences of the ongoing pandemic is it’s finally made me grateful for my father’s stories of hardship and deprivation growing up in the 1940s.

Like the times he would be upset about one of his pet rabbits running away, but at least there was a decent stew for dinner that night. Or the time my grandmother was almost arrested for having a tiny hole in the sheet of iron they covered the window with during blackout. And the guilt he later felt for constantly asking her when Uncle Bill would be coming home and not understanding that the answer was, Never.

Knowing what I know now about trauma, I feel terrible for internally rolling my eyes and thinking ‘Here he goes again,’ when the topics came up.

So what’s this got to do with a pandemic eighty years later?
Perspective. That’s what.

Hearing these stories from an early age, sometimes to the point of cliché, might possibly be the reason I have very little sympathy with anti-lockdown sentiment.

It’s not a stretch to take some of the bad-faith arguments against lockdowns and apply them to wartime efforts.

“The government is telling us what we can eat, what we can spend our money on, how much fuel we can use, what we can write in letters and even when we can have the lights on. They tell us this is to defend our freedom but they’ve already taken all our freedom away. This is already a dictatorship. The question is how long we’re prepared to stand for being treated like this by our own representatives before we just learn to live with a foreign occupation.”

The answer of course was, As long as it takes. And no-one in their right mind would suggest it wasn’t the right thing to do.

Then there are those who don’t deny the risk of letting the virus spread but ask whether life is even worth living without being able to go to the footy, have pint of craft IPA after work, or go out for a smashed avocado brunch. That would be the same smashed avo which in the pre-pandemic times, some claimed was the reason young people can’t afford a house. Turns out it was actually an essential service and a pillar of the economy.

The question of a life worth living is one I would be interested to ask the great uncle I’m named after. It’s not for me to say, but in the scheme of things I suspect he wouldn’t mind spending a few months or even a few years stuck at home without being able to go to the gym or the mall. We’ll never know because he was killed in New Guinea at the age of 23.

He shouldn’t have been there. As a conscript, he couldn’t be sent overseas but he volunteered on the promise of having better opportunies when he came home. He bet his life on a better future and lost. Even then, he should have been on leave at the time but had traded with a mate. A life worth living?

None of this is to minimise the very real trauma people are experiencing over lockdown. My wife is from the US. She hasn’t seen her parents in nearly four years and there’s no chance of that changing any time soon. If she goes to visit them, there’s a serious possibility she won’t be allowed back into Australia. Even so, she is considering it because they are not getting any younger. It’s a terrible choice to have to make.

Any interruption to life as you know it, or expect it to be, is traumatic. Even the ones which used to be tagged #FirstWorldProblems. No-one will come out of COVID unscathed and knowing that you’re not living through a war is of no real comfort.

What can be of comfort is practicing gratitude. Today, I’m grateful for the Afghan refugees I work with, and for the stories Dad would bore me with so often. Both offer some perspective.
   
 

 

Who is John Galt? They all are now!

You might remember – although you probably don’t – a time around ten years ago at the height of the Tea Party cult. (By the way, whatever happened to them?)

Around this time, a whole lot of loudmouths who thought they held the world together – the bankers, the stockbrokers, the hedge fund managers, the lawyers, the talk radio hosts, the columnists, the talking heads on news channels – were threatening to “Go Galt.”

The expression was a dog-whistle reference to a character in the novel Atlas Shrugged – a libertarian masturbatory fantasy aimed at the feeble-minded – who removed himself from society. One by one, he took similar elites with him until, somehow, society collapsed without them. In 2010, they were essentially threatening to strike, although the word smacked far too much of workers’ rights for them even to countenance using it.

I always wished they would. I said at the time, they should go for it. If withdrawing such services was going to teach the mean old socialists a lesson about who keeps the world turning, I still say they should have done it. I think the lesson would have been the opposite of what they expected, so I’m sorry they never quite got angry enough to test their theory.

Cut back to present day, and a funny thing has happened: Due to spatial distancing and self-isolation requirements to reduce the spread of Covid 19 to manageable levels, they have all been forced to withdraw their services.

And they’re pissed about it! What’s more, nobody misses them.

The true heroes in these challenging times are just who any reasonable person would expect them to be: Doctors, nurses, paramedics, truck drivers, shelf-stackers, checkout operators, cleaners. You might notice a few minimum-wage positions in there.

This may be a naïve hope but it some good can come out of this global crisis, it might be a reassessment of what we value. It’s at times like this we begin to see the absurdity of betting on the price of crops that haven’t even been planted yet. Even the staunchest of free market rationalist governments have suddenly stopped regarding unemployment as a personal failing on the part of those affected by it.

Let’s try to keep up this new understanding of what’s really important.