The Value of Care
This is a time in which we are all acutely aware of how disenfranchised and powerless we can become, when so many of the previously everyday things we took for granted, are suddenly rendered inaccessible. Welcome to the everyday reality for one in five people living on this planet.
Living with a disability is not a concept so far removed from all of our everyday reality that we can not imagine it. After all many of us, even if not disabled ourselves will have a disabled relative or friend, or have been injured, ill or otherwise incapacitated for a short period, and so have some insight into what living with a disability entails.
How soon we forget though. How easily we dismiss the impact it had upon us or others when what we think are more important every day tasks, take over our lives and fill both our waking and unconscious thoughts. It would be nice to think that after this pandemic has faded that we will not simply return to the world we inhabited before.
A world where not only the planet itself and the natural ecosystems we have for so long abused, have started to bounce back (after what is after all a very short respite) but just as importantly, a world in which the new currency of value is the willingness and ability to care. It is this commodity that will build a new safer future, and is in itself not something that can be nurtured outside of the environments and communities in which we all live.
Caring is not just what will have gotten us through this modern panic inducing plague, but is also what has brought us to this point in our evolution. The ability to adapt and empathise for those who are not part of our immediate family or tribe, has enabled the whole of human social evolution, and arguably every technological break through, from the spear to the laboratory vial. Concern and love for someone who is not us, is what defines humanity. Not money or status or pride or power.
With that acknowledgement should come a greater and more complete appreciation and empathy for what it means to be disabled. It should come as no surprise that many of the feelings that we feel now, are identical to those felt everyday by the disabled. Feelings imposed by a hostile world that weakens and destroys the very same capabilities those with disabilities often posses. An Isolation extended because the able bodied world incapacitates them further through ignorance. Like a mechanical potential, stunted through incapacitation, the disabling of many people, has for years been something that society has enabled with lazy design and the adoration of the selfish, at the expense of the selfless.
Soon we will all know just what it means to be stuck in for weeks on end with no human contact. We will all have a limited but greater understanding of what it means to not be able to access those things able bodied people take for granted every day.
I will use as an example my partner. The person I have loved and cared for the past 25 years. She only has the use of one hand. Imagine then, trying to wash that one hand and produce enough foam with hand soap to lather and break down the fatty protection around Covid 19 and thereby interrupt it’s progress. Imagine what the instructions not to touch your face with unwashed hands that have touched surfaces sounds like, when your mouth itself often becomes your second hand. Used to hold objects, tear open packaging, hold utensils while you pick up a second object.
Imagine when not only do you not have the use of one hand, but you have severely compromised mobility, and so are usually confined to a wheelchair, but you live in a bungalow some genius has decided requires steps to enter. Imagine also that because of your brain injury you have epilepsy and left side neglect (not being able to see dangers etc on your left side) and that you have trouble navigating outside, so much so that you have not been out alone without a carer for years.
Imagine then having to live with those barriers and obstacles and then still not making the governments vulnerable list during lock down.
Imagine then realising there are no supermarket delivery dates for weeks. Imagine then realising you may be about to run out of your medication and because of your trouble planning ahead you will have to wait and maybe die having a seizure during that wait. Ponder if you will for a few short moments, what the impact of those dependent on daily personal care not being offered critical care, ( when ICU’s are full), does to your level of anxiety, when you think you have symptoms of this virus.
For many, having a partner who is also their carer is a lifeline, but for many others this is not a support mechanism they are part of. Carers are sometimes family or friends and those who claim whilst doing so, often get less financial support than the unemployed. Think about the message that sends out about the worth of caring. Those tireless carers who do the job professionally are also usually paid minimum wage and given impossible huge lists and very little time or resources in which to fulfil them. Think again about what that says about our collective (or the governments we elect) view of caring.
The NHS is all about caring. It is what they do. We have started to recognise this and yet so many voted for those who dismissed the concerns of ‘experts’ and jeered at the sacrifices that those who work in the NHS undertake every day. People who work for the NHS do so because they recognise the innate value of caring for others. It is the same motivation that keeps many key workers risking their own health and lives everyday when they leave the safety of their homes on our behalf. It is a principle we would all do well to nurture.
If we had cared more, not just for the displaced communities but also the sentient creatures on the lands destroyed wholesale for vast industrial farming operations, this virus and others like it, would not have moved so easily between wild animals and humans. Factory Farming and eating wild animals is not good for us, and it will not simply go away because China is banning the markets selling it.
Eating rare wild animals is seen as a symbol of status in China but it is not only this practice that has put us all globally in such mortal danger. It is thought by some there, that eating these animals will allow the person eating them to absorb that animals power and abilities. Much like people here in the west seduced by the temptation of status, voting for tyrannical leaders and idiot like, but rich buffoons, believing that some of that wealth will be transferred and absorbed in a kind of aspirational osmosis. The reality is that along with all that rich meat comes a rich and toxic range of poisonous and noxious attitudes. This is the social cancer that eats away at the heart of all societies, Capitalist, Communist or Socialist.
Status is all about hierarchies. It is a literal excuse for not caring. Not caring about the lives of wild animals. Not caring about the wages of peasants. Not caring about health professionals. Not caring about supermarket workers or cleaners. Not caring. That is what drives disease and the breakdown of those common bonds that make us human. We have a golden opportunity to reject that model and we MUST grasp it.
We need to redefine the language of care. It is not weak to care. It is in it’s very nature to be a strengthening experience and a passionate pursuit. It is not something to be praised as though it were something rare and obscure that only some people can do. It should be something we all aspire to. We can all embrace, not just the ethos of caring, but also when we see it being adopted as the choice of others, we can encourage it as an attitude to treasure. We will do well to recognise it and nurture in our children, and reward it proportionately when it is practiced as a profession or a personal duty. That means simple things like recognising responsible parenting as a choice, not a cop out, and enabling extended families to embrace the care needs of others, not penalising careers or expressing disappointment when people choose to take this path. And yes it means caring more about the natural world and animals too.
When you can finally embrace your loved ones and touch their faces, remember how basic fixes like universal access, can help remove barriers to connections, that we all impose every time we fail to challenge them. When at last you are able to resume working and feel the satisfaction of a job well done, and the financial rewards that brings, remember that, before making an excuse for why you can not implement the changes to extend that opportunity to a disabled person. It may be the very reason that they are still stuck at home.
Do not forget that feeling of isolation and disconnectedness. Try not to sweep away how painful it was when that very primal human desire to communicate in person was frustrated by a hostile and unforgiving dangerous world. Hold onto that empty and unfulfilled resentment, and turn it into an angry energy. A feeling of outrage that for so long, so many, were condemned to the injustice of being treated like they were the reason for society’s ills, second class citizens and nobodies, when the real poison is an obsession with power and status, at the expense of others.
