An Uneasy Twilight

So: Leeds is in local lockdown. There’s a kind of grinding inevitability about it: bound up with resignation and disillusionment, a breakage of solidarity, an anger that tends more toward outright denial — the consolation of conspiracy, of face masks as the nail in the coffin of liberty, or the misanthropic suspicion of snitching on neighbours — than a sense of collective outrage at the Government for their dereliction. It’s facile to lord judgement over the populace from one’s bunker, to brand those spilling out on the streets after the 10pm curfew as ‘COVIDiots’, particularly given the sacrifices so many have had to bear, the grief so many have had to suffer, as if trampled underfoot by revellers intoxicated on the only sacrosanct British right — those glorious, morbid festivities upon a ship sinking under its own rot. We will know very little of the lives of those caught up in lurid Leeds Live snapshots — yet, in our helplessness, we blame one another unto oblivion.

After all, if we impute the onslaught of the disease to just some mass recklessness, some primitive, masochistic trigger of selfishness deep within the human psyche, we don’t have to believe that anything more could be possible. We don’t have to hazard trust in each other. There is perhaps a mystified sense here of how decades of neo-liberalism have compromised our social relations and marred our instincts of responsibility to one other, even of the maladaptations of our noxious drinking culture to deep-seated alienation — but even so, it begs the question about this pandemic the Tories would never entertain: what has it done to our hearts? Wasn’t the isolation and atomization already grave enough before?

The snare of melancholy and misery can itself remove us from such empathy: luring us to vindictiveness and hostility, rather than hope and compassion, entrenching the lonely, bitter cynicism that everyone just gets their due, that everyone’s out to hurt one another anyway. Screening out the messiness of it all, the fact of how compromised and flawed we all are, consoled by the flickering light of the TV or the muted, dimmed festivities drifting through otherwise desolate streets. The strangeness of it all, the dread and dismay of some shadow of loss bleeding across the bedevilled nights and days. The fantasies into which we retreat amid the shock and numbness of it all, compensating for how little faith or control we have, how little we have to look forward to anymore. Aren’t you just tired of it now? What about people forsaken and dying due to suicide? That aching heave, the weary retaliation, of weighing such desperate stakes.

The patchwork ambiguity and chaos of the rules does few favours with compliance, even less so when Government ministers openly break them without consequence whilst £10,000 fines are meted out upon the rest of us. Scapegoating young people for the resurgence in COVID after driving them out to consume with little disposable income and work precarious jobs in the very arenas where the infection would easily spread, condescending a generation dispossessed by harsh wealth inequality that they were over-paranoid and it was their moral duty to save the economy, reveals less about the intrinsic carelessness of our demographic than it does a shambling ruling class desperate to deflect attention from their own negligence and avarice.

This calamity was long in the making: the Government have presided over such a warped, insecure and imbalanced economy that their only solution to the damage incurred by COVID — a mere few months of hospitality closed down resulting in an unprecedented economic contraction — was a restaurant discount scheme incentivising a mass recirculation of the virus. If not for a clutter of policy contortions and half-measures that prioritized the opening of the economy over public health, and the outsourced debacle of testing and tracing, a second wave might not have been so readily provoked.

Now those same young people, unsure if they’d ever even make it to university after nearly being defrauded of the A-Level results they were entitled to if not for mass outcry, are being held hostage for their rent and fees by marketized universities and outsourced companies running residential halls, after they were sold an ever glossier, embellished ‘student experience’ that could never be possible under conditions of the virus. To frame young people as anything but victims here would be an insult, with their futures once again entirely sold short, one of the most formative experiences of their lives blighted. The cops can storm scattered house parties or illegal raves and throw their weight around all they like — but making an example of a 20-something DJ trapped in the gig economy with a £10,000 fine is just bludgeoning people already at the precipice, already bereft of a sense of promise or hope. Whether they’re pursuing fragments of collective joy or leaning into the death drive, they’re searching for salvation at the end of the world just like everybody else. If you won’t bail them out from toiling at great risk behind the bar, materially enabling them to stay safe at home, how can you blame them for drinking at the other side of it?

Young workers who can’t afford to stay off sick will go to work, undeterred by the threat of fines for failing to self-isolate, and a draconian ban on anti-capitalist teaching material won’t stifle their resentment at the indignity that their health is relegated behind profit. The authoritarian, arrogant grandstanding of a Conservative majority seeking to extend the emergency powers vested by the Coronavirus Act is already giving under its handling of the pandemic: they have no answers for those marginalized and exploited at the peripheries of the economy. There are no guarantees here: the spectre of austerity should have toppled the Tories in any just or reasonable world, and they are emboldened now by the kind of hubris where you can inflict such deliberate suffering on a populace and still win. A raft of new tenant, community and worker organizers might well be their gravediggers — furlough was the glimpse of that most sacred of working-class inheritance, the demand to not just have better remunerated or protected work but a freedom from work that does not serve our health and well-being.

Ultimately, then, nothing’s quite normal — no amount of adjustment can breach the chasm of not being able to embrace a loved one, can kindle the mist of an intimacy forbidden, absent — and yet the routines creak with the weight of a familiar darkness. Summer was shaded by an uneasy twilight, about to wilt into a winter eclipse. I worry about being severed from loved ones. I worry about friends returning to their workplaces, or not finding work at all. I worry about, agonize over, who else we might lose, and dwell on those we still mourn, all the missed possibilities still yet to grieve. The quiet, important deeds that pull one through the day — checking in with and trying to bolster friends who are ill, sending out another newsletter on tenants’ rights around eviction, preparing a letter with a family member whose boss is attempting to force them back into the call centre — can seem to pale against the terror raging all around us.

It can begin to feel like wading through sludge, navigating a maelstrom, waiting on the edge of catastrophe. Like maybe none of it will measure up. But, then, that’s not quite the point, is it? Believing in one another is. Practicing kindness, and solidarity, and warmth, however we can, against whatever odds, is. Holding to the noble resistance of every good, as we strive to better the lot of those around us, is. There are new worlds aflame in every glimmer of connection and struggle we share, guiding our purpose and resolve against the turmoil; graces, the faintest and brightest memory of someone, lingering just beyond the brink, breathing light over the tremor of the waves. One could chase the frayed threads forever as they come undone, or else stitch the strands into our banner, and lift its beauty to the tempest.