Vaxed and Vexed
I wake up often to the sound of a helicopters and sirens. Copters and cops are the norm in Auburn, where I live. It’s one of several LGAs—Leb Gronk Areas—in super lockdown, which is to say a more aggressive quarantine than other areas of Sydney and NSW, that has clearly failed, not because we aren’t obeying the rules, but because the region is predominantly made up of essential workers who can’t stay home. The biggest industries are healthcare and social assistance (11.6%), followed by retail trade (10.2%). In short, we’re suffering not because it’s strictly required, but as symbolic security theatre for the rest of the nation, so that our government, which has only proven competent at failing, looks like it’s actually on top of a disaster that was created as much by their mistakes as by the virus itself.
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In my first post, I wrote about how concerning it was to hear the Prime Minister say he wants “the army on the streets” in response to an anti-lockdown rally in Western Sydney. Not long after, the army was in fact called on, with three hundred soldiers deployed. Sometimes, people hear “Western Sydney” and they imagine a couple of derelict suburbs when we’re talking about a massive region of 2.5 million people, 35% of whom were born overseas. By itself, Western Sydney has the third largest economy in Australia, behind only Sydney CBD and Melbourne. As well as being home to many migrant and refugee communities, this is taking place at a time when the army is under serious scrutiny for war crimes in Afghanistan, including the likes of decorated soldier Ben Roberts-Smith, who has been implicated in the unlawful murder of six Afghans and who wore a Crusaders cross on his uniform. It doesn’t matter now whether the soldiers are providing logistical and material support instead of the threatened door-knocking and enforced compliance, the damage this move has had on our trust can’t be understated.
This morning, as I write, 319 cases have been announced in NSW. Every day we wake to this tally of the sick, the infectious, and the dead. It is alarming, even without cops and soldiers on the streets. It should hardly need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway: nobody needs to be more anxious. Take it from someone with an anxiety disorder—being more scared and more worried doesn’t help anyone. The only thing that’s helped me is material support in the form of medication, a qualified support network, and the care of loved ones. It was exceedingly difficult to acquire and maintain pre-pandemic, and it’s almost impossible now. While we’re forced to stay at home, and to attend these daily tallies of fearful news and threatened restrictions, we need a clear and unconditional message from our government about what the problems are, and how our resources are going to be used to see us through to the other side of this, no matter what. Our resources. Instead, our elected officials continue on one hand to tell us this is a national emergency, and on the other hand to treat support measures like welfare payments—giving barely enough to survive, and implying all the while that we shouldn’t need it and don’t deserve it. In case anyone has forgotten, our ruling government is conservative, their guiding ethos has always been profit over health, corporate-funded contempt for science over sensible policy, and culture wars over intergenerational community, all in service of a myopic and relentless quest to reinstate the colonial past instead of laying down principled plans for a sustainable future.
In sum, the reason we don’t have a clear message, we don’t have sufficient vaccines, and don’t have enough support is because this type of governance is not designed to care for us, it’s designed to aggravate and maintain class divisions. This is why we’re in such a precarious state right now. It isn’t just incompetence, it’s the end result of a long ideological assault on our ability to live together and care for another—an ideology that continues to privilege private schools over public, to undercut our scientific capabilities, to diminish our tertiary system which has lost tens of thousands of jobs in the past year, and to at every step undermine the idea of expertise. One of the most popular phrases of conservatives in the past decade has been, “I’m not an expert, but…” and in the middle of a global pandemic, when we need most of all to listen to experts, to at least trust what we’ve been told even if we don’t understand it, we’re reaping what they’ve sown, which is the elevation of the village idiot to chief surgeon, chief scientist, chief doctor, chief researcher, and chief journalist. It should surprise no one that we’re now dying en masse and amid massive confusion. Really, it’s a miracle we made it this far at all without the apparatus falling to pieces.
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Confession: I am a village idiot. This is not false humility—the sum of what I know and what I can do is terrifyingly small. If something breaks, I pay for someone who knows what they’re doing to come and fix it. I don’t know how to farm or how to garden. I don’t know how to sew or how to cook. I can’t build furniture and my general response to pain is “hope it goes away”. How does air-conditioning work? No idea. Computers? Go to hell. I can plug shit in, I can sign into accounts, I can “surf” the web (don’t ask me to actually surf, I’ll drown) but the fundamental principles behind the technologies that we rely on escapes me. Arthur C Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and to that I would simply say it doesn’t even need to be advanced.
I have two degrees, a BA in Communication (Writing and Cultural Studies), and a Masters in Creative Writing. I am an award-winning poet by trade. All I have ever wanted to do is read and write, in that order, and I’m exceptionally skilled at both. I grew up in Liverpool and Lurnea, raised first by my aunty and then my mother, both single parents born in Lebanon, and I went to public schools in the area. I’m not the “latte-sipping elite” that our millionaire private-school educated politicians want you to hate (I drink cappuccinos, or a can of V). It’s because of my mother and her siblings, none of whom finished high school, that I know firsthand the difference between being able to read and understanding what you have read. Whenever there is a letter or report from a doctor, from council or from lawyers, utilising a vocabulary they are unfamiliar with, I am asked to explain what it means. They are literate enough to read the words, but not educated enough to be sure of what is being communicated.
The difficulty with language is the way in which meaning is predicated on the assumption that the reader has at their grasp the entire network of associations invoked by each reference. Knowledge operates in a similar way, where what you know is built on a related subset of other fields of knowledge. Earlier, I made a joke about LGAs meaning “Leb Gronk Areas”, which relies on the assumption that a) you know the actual acronym is Local Government Area, and b) that “Leb” is slang for Lebanese-Australians but can also encompass any brown person in Western Sydney. I’m even relying on you knowing what gronk means and truthfully, I’m not even sure I do, except that I know one when I see one. Another example: when I say I don’t know how to cook, what this means varies depending on qualifies as cooking to you. It’s common for people to say, “I can’t cook—I mean, one or two dishes, you know, but nothing fancy”, to which someone else will say, “Oh well that means you can cook!” Herein lies the difference between being able to read a recipe, and understanding the principles of cooking, of flavours, that then enables you to create a meal. I often ask my aunty to teach me how to cook, and she always says with exasperation, “It’s easy!” because she has at her disposal a knowledge and understanding that profoundly outstrips my own. She’ll rattle off a list of instructions, and I’ll be lost before she gets to her second sentence even though she’s using plain English, because I don’t know what half the ingredients she refers to even look like, let alone taste like, or how to prepare them properly.
Now think for a minute about how much information we’re coming across every single day, how much people are reading, but not understanding, and you’ll begin to fathom just how much trouble we’re in. Every day, I have relatives sending me videos of conspiracy theories around coronavirus and vaccines. Suddenly, people who dropped out of high school, who routinely mocked me for reading, professed themselves experts on science, chemistry, public health policy, and more! I was amazed. They say to me, “Do your research, cuz, it’s all bullshit.” First of all, I am very excited by this newfound desire for research. Secondly, watching random videos on WhatsApp, Instagram, or Youtube is not research, the definition of which is “the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.”
Whenever I receive one of these videos, the first question I ask my uncle or brother or cousin—kings and queens of research—is: who is this person? They never know the answer. Why do you trust them more than your doctor? They don’t know that either. What’s common to these conspiracy videos is that they’re usually filmed on a phone by people who often look and sound like my relatives, using language they understand. The selfie mode, the livestreaming, also lends an air of authenticity to the videos—this is happening right now, this person is real, this is not manufactured. Except, of course, that it is manufactured. These videos are spreading on platforms which manipulate the content you see not based on usefulness or truthfulness, but on your likelihood to engage with it. Some people are scared and genuinely trying to understand what’s happening; many more are just trying to capitalise on fear to boost their profiles. The more you click on these videos, the more likely you are to see others. This is a manufactured space full of misinformation and selfish people who care more about a viral moment than stopping a virus that’s killed millions. Last month, several “influencers” on social media revealed they’d been approached by a company offering to pay them to put out coronavirus misinformation and to “pretend they were spontaneously giving advice out of concern for their viewers.” This type of video is so common it’s become a recognisable genre, which is easily duplicated.
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I told my uncle I’m fully vaccinated and he was horrified. “Do you know what’s in it?”
“No,” I said. “Do you know every part of an airplane?”
“No, so what?”
“But you get on planes without knowing, yes? You trust that all the experts who put it together and who operate it know what they’re doing. Why?”
“Because I need to get from A to B,” he said. In short, because he has no choice. He sent me a number of videos from random people who don’t know anything, but he then referenced hearing Pauline Hanson on the radio and Alan Jones, both famously racist individuals who have no expertise in any subject except maybe the sound of their voices. This is the other problem. Random videos on their own would not be enough on their own—the reason they can act as any kind of testimony is because anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-expertise ideology has been supported and broadcast at the highest levels. “She’s in government, she has to know things,” my uncle said. “He’s on TV and the radio.”
In an ideal world, you would be able to trust what a senator or a broadcaster of note had to say about matters of public health—assuming that quality measures would be in place to prevent lies and false claims being made—but we are far from an ideal world, and there are many people in government like Pauline Hanson, who is anti-vaccine and has made several false statements over the past few months; MP Craig Kelly who was permanently banned from Facebook for spreading lies about viruses and vaccines; or MP George Christensen, who flouted the law by not wearing a mask in Question Time, and opposes mandatory vaccinations. Despite frequently making claims that go against medical advice, he says he’s not aiding vaccine hesitancy and even if he were, the true concern is “freedom hesitancy”, a spectacularly stupid claim that has been defended by the Prime Minister as a matter of free speech. Christensen recently attended an anti-lockdown rally in Mackay with Qanon fanatics, and so far, the Prime Minister has not called for the army in response. Imagine that.
Despite this, the people being blamed for the spread of the virus are poor, working class and under-educated people in Western Sydney, when the reality is that the government has failed to procure enough vaccines and has overseen a chaotic rollout with communication so weak its own MPs aren’t convinced. If this is an emergency of such proportions that 16 million Australians have to be locked down, why isn’t the vaccine mandatory? Why are government MPs and broadcasters like Alan Jones and Sky News allowed to continue to broadcast lies about the virus and the vaccines? Whatever else happens, you can be sure of one thing: those to blame are not confused people doing their best to survive, but the people in power who have guided us to this disastrous outcome.