It's cold outside. I don't like it when Winter pretends to be Spring, but it is nice how the rain brings out the lusciousness of the green. Making it richer, appearing more alive. Like the absence of msit on a clear day.
How do we escape this situation in lieu of a persistent virus and no visible vaccine? How does one lift a lockdown?
They haev no plan. To be fair - and I've no desire to give Tory filth a fair shake given what they are and what they've done - what plan could there be? This is the very definition of "up the creek without a paddle". Once you're in that kind of situation, you're in that kind of situation.
So much relies on social contact and in the age of social distancing, which, let's be honest, isn't beeing observed 100% because it can't be. My local shop, for example, is too small for it, and they have yet to introduce some kind of traffic system. Everyone relies on a combination of good will and good old fear.
Charity shops, for example, are going to struggle. I walk past one every time I visit the shop. Of course it's closed, and will be fore the foreseeable. How can they accept donations now? They don't clean what they receive, and you can't very well put books and furniture through the wash. They can't possibly rely on the behaviour of people making donations, especially when so many were previously content to just dump stuff outside, come rain or shine.
Pubs run the risk of attracting a tsunami of thirsty and socially hungry fleshbags the moment lockdown lifts. All the old sots that hang around Wetherspoons will fall back on old habits. Is this wise? Can these places survive if they have to give over half their space to emptiness and social distancing? How will that work for the toilets? Of course it won't. People will just overwhelm it and so places will close or be closed. Half the customers, half the staff. It could well be the only places with demand, other than supermarkets, will be the good old jobcentre, and being seen there is a logistical effort commensurate with a state visit from a foreign dignitary (or Trump) at the best of times.
I can't really see social distancing working in a place like my local WCA assessment centre. The waiting room is pokey and situated at the top of the building. Not much room for manoeuvre. How many appointments will a reduced workforce have? This all assumes people will get booked in as normal, which they will because that's how bureaucracy works. Common - or what you might call Covid - sense doesn't enter into it.
How do you socially distance while signing on or undertaking something like a Work Focused Interview? I'm due to have one at the end of Summer. I assume, in some form, it will go ahead (though what they expect me to report I do not know, my Asperger diagnostic appointment got cancelled of course). In situations like this, peopel want to hunker down because they want privacy. They want to have invisible walls around them and a strange intimacy with their interviewer so that no one else gets to hear the shame of their social position, or hear them get chewed out (or lose their temper) by the usual soulless minion of orthodoxy. That can't happen if everyone has to be 2m apart, including between staff and customer.
Today is International Workers Day. Now more than ever we need solidarity and direct action. I've said this before, I'll say it again. But for now, I needn't say more. If a pandemic killing tens of thousands isn't enough to stire the capitalist class into compassion, then you know the reality of class war. Currently they care only about their profits; that's why so many reactionaries are pushing for an end to lockdown.
Oh hell no, we ain't dying for your profit
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