Somedays it feels like I’ve been in quarantine for longer than two months. Some days I’ll wake up groaning, the hours stretching ahead before me like a deja vu. Other mornings I’m brimming with the enthusiasm through no fault of my own. My working theory is that the apartment is so tiny that being confined here has made it take on Narnian qualities, like a slightly overheated wardrobe, allowing me access into a world where time works differently. Time, as the physicists warned us, really is relative.
Small rituals have kept me sane. I name everything now. My inner saboteur is called Becky since no one called Becky can judge you for long. I named my lamp Israfeel, my TV Judy, and my couch Bert, short for Bertha. I named most of my cutlery but not the knives because turns out they’re racist. Other things have imporoved: my cooking has gone from Instagram-worthy to actually edible - a distinction not enough people are making - and I have perfected the art of shuffling from bed to sofa and back again without letting my blanket touch the floor even once.
Their main argument claims, insofar as I can understand it, that any restriction on their personhood at all by the US government is a violation of their “human rights”
There is an ease to hibernation when the weather outside is awful, but this past week NYC had blue skies and a warm sun, meaning white people went crazy. At the first sun beam I spied dozens outside, sunning themselves in parks and on sidewalks, most of them mask-less, all of them gloveless, none of them socially distant. I notice white exceptionalism more and more during this pandemic. Middle aged joggers wearing designer running tights no no mask; girls called Kendra and Tiffany sipping on an iced coffee but not wearing any gloves, Jason the mechanic who chews tobacco on the corner and spits it out, todays equivalent to biological warfare.
I don’t single out white people to be provocative. America has found new and inventive ways to disappoint the world's expectations every day during this pandemic, we all know this. But there is an implicit racial bias built into the foundational fabric of this country that keeps making itself conspicuous, most recently on the front pages of newspapers here showing white protesters cramming state capital buildings carrying military grade weapons. The images of these people were not disturbing merely because they show breathtaking stupidity sporting mullets; no, it was infuriating because of its bald, confrontational hypocrisy. Imagine if you will what would happen had a group of 200 Black or Latino or Arab US citizens walking into any of the state buildings with loaded weapons to “protest” their right to ignore science. There is zero chance that that would end with police standing calmly as people spat in their face. Zero. In America schoolchildren literally have a higher chance of being killed than white protestors.
It’s a problem that is bubbling up with men who don’t like being told what to do - religious or otherwise - all over the world. Hassidic Jews in Brooklyn, fundamental Christians in Utah, born-again Christians in Michigan, whatever the hell they believe in Florida, mullahs in Pakistan, clerics in Indonesia, priests in India, neo-nazis in Scandinavia. None of them want their power confronted by neither a government or virus
It would be easy to dismiss their vitriol and counter intuitive self-destructive behaviors are aberrations, as one has over the years. That Trump is president is only one sign that thats not feasible. If white supremacists are protesting the lockdown of the country because of a disease that is disproportionately killing off the poor and people of colour, that's not feasible at all. Their main argument claims, insofar as I can understand it, that any restriction on their personhood at all by government is a violation of their “human rights”. As to which human rights those are changes on how irate they get, but beyond the vitriol, a lot of their messaging essentially frames the right to worship in gatherings as a fundamental right akin to breathing. What the protesters are actually saying is that you can’t tell white men what to do.
A person's right to personal faith does not extend to putting communities at physical danger. For as long as I have lived in America I have known it is two different countries. My pet theory is that after their civil war, the defeated and racist South never got over seeing the federal government as the Northern enemy, and this distrust evolved over generations into a knee-jerk hatred of federal law that is almost genetic. As a Pakistani, I know better than most that its not just America. It’s a problem that is bubbling up with men who don’t like being told what to do - religious or otherwise - all over the world. Hassidic jews in Brooklyn, fundamental Christians in Utah, born-again Christians in Michigan, whatever the hell they believe in Florida, mullahs in Pakistan, clerics in Indonesia, priests in India, neo-Nazis in Scandinavia. None of them want their power confronted by neither a government or virus.
Hate never disappears, it merely dsguises itself. Misogyny didn't disappear the minute women got the vote or arrived in the workforce; it just scurried into a dark corner under the Traditional vs Modern Values moral debate. That a maulvi could blame the pandemic on the morality of women in Pakistan and we just shrug proves that. When it became untenable to be blatantly anti-gay in the West, homophobes quickly reframed their bigotry as a religious objection to the word “marriage” and a defense of “family values”. Racism hardly disappeared after Segregation ended, no more than it did after Obama left office. My point is any assault to the system that threatens these mens' power makes then angry, and frankly no one has time for their hissy fits.
Pakistan’s - the world's- continued investment in religious dogma in any level of statecraft has led us to where we have to accept a scientifically untrained men’s outrage over with the same deference as we would scientific fact when drafting public health policy. That's ridiculous. Its ridiculous in any country. I think the time for the capitulation to exceptionalism - for the religious right, for white privilege, for deference to First World narratives as the sole story - is now coming to an end. We are, I hope, moving towards a more honest future.
Then again, yesterday I christened my salt shaker Abhishek-Abhi Don’t Shake, so take what I say with a grain of, well, you know…
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