Pulling together when panic goes viral
NOT a well-timed ad campaign. Spotted in the liquor store window in my local mall yesterday.
I saw my doctor yesterday. “So where’s the next book?” he asked. “I’m expecting one telling us all how to manage the corona virus. Isn’t that what you do? Tell us how to act during crises?”
He’s joking, but only partly. “Funny you should say that,” I said. “I realise I’m a professional meddler, telling everyone how to live their lives, but that’s very similar to what my publisher said a month ago, before all this blew up.”
Louise Grantham, who heads up the appropriately named indie publisher Bookstorm, and I had met to discuss the third in my green book series, the cookbook I’ve been wanting and trying to write for decades. But we agreed to hold it over for another year, and instead to make Book Number 3 about more urgent issues – the somewhat apocalyptic shocks that seem to be coming faster and faster. Loadshedding is an obvious challenge for everyone at the moment – including the millions of South Africans who already live off the grid courtesy of poverty and isolation. For them, power blackouts affect jobs, transport, infrastructure, piling extra burdens on already buckling backs.
Meanwhile, spectres loom everywhere: locusts are settling on crops, our dams are ominously low and our rivers are poisoned, fire and flood are becoming the new normal.
“We need to know how to cope with crisis,” said Louise. “More challenges are on their way, and we need to be able to react and act constructively” (she clearly has a good crystal ball). We both agreed that we didn’t want a book with the words “coping” or “crisis” in the title. Too negative: we need to be thinking creatively and compassionately about how to absorb the shocks in store for us, how to be practical and pro-active, to work effectively in teams.
Back to my doctor’s office. He tells me that while the corona virus is serious, what really frightens him is the public responses he sees: the panic, the combination of savagery and silliness that leads to toilet-paper punch-ups, conspiracies about radio waves, naked racism bursting out like boils. “There needs to be a word for the special kind of hysteria that goes viral – pun intended – at times like this,” he says. “We saw it during the Day Zero panic in the Western Cape. We’re not equipped, not taught how to behave sensibly and practically when facing public crises.”
We spoke about the ignorance seen even in those with the best education: as shelves are cleared of hand sanitisers, don’t people realise they can get the same results wiping their skin with vodka or even meths? And what IS it with toilet paper? (Kitty litter I can understand, but…) Don’t folk realise how easy it is to improvise a bidet with a spray bottle or even a jug of water?
At a panel at last year’s Kingsmead Book Fair, we were asked by the superb chair, Angelo Fick, what one practical thing we would do to help build a feminist world. I said I’d make it a rule that before anyone, of any gender, was allowed to graduate from high school, they would first have to pass exams, written and practical, on how to: budget, shop, cook nutritious meals, clean up afterwards, knit, sew and mend, recycle, do basic first aid (including hygiene) and household repairs, change a tyre, grow their own veg, plant trees, make compost, use Google and Excel properly, and care for an infant for a minimum of eight hours (including feeding and nappy-changing). What touched me was that the high-school scholars in the audience cheered and whooped. Many came to me afterwards to say that these were indeed the skills they wanted to learn.
We sign our children up for expensive tutoring in geography and geometry, but we’ve rendered them often helpless and “stupid” in a different kind of way. Amy, Louise’s daughter, pointed out that it is her generation that will have to salvage the incredible hash we elders have made of the planet and the economy, but that her same generation has never been taught HOW to do this. And it’s not just the absence of formal teaching of practical skills that will be necessary to rehabilitate the planet and create new ways and patterns of living. We’re not teaching collective skills; we still think networking is something we do at events to boost our careers – yet we don’t know how to build networks that buffer against disaster.
I discuss this with twenty-something friends, and they agree, also noting that the local and informal networks older generations belonged to – churches and religious organisations, choirs, stokvels, Lions and Rotary Clubs, Girl Guides and Boy Scouts, PTAs, sewing circles – are largely absent from their lives. Too many have been taught to forge their individual paths, but not how to engage constructively and humanely with their neighbours, much less how to tackle problems communally.
A glance at nearly any neighbourhood WhatsApp or Facebook group will prove this point: racism, conspiracy theories and fake news abound, and not necessarily because people are bad, but because they have absolutely no clue how to conduct themselves in the format of a group with shared concerns.
Social media is an incredibly powerful weapon with potential for good (when a community can be mobilised in minutes to search for a missing child, for instance), but too often it becomes one more place where we can squeal “Me, myself, I!” instead of sharing useful information and practices appropriately. We’ve all seen these train-smashes: a bloke administrating a water-shedding Facebook group at the height of the H2O crisis decided this would be a good platform to start a debate on abortion. Really? Does crisis shut down the human brain to some reptilian level?
Religious groups are still vital support networks: whenever a small town runs out of water or is inundated by floods, it seems “who you gonna call” is invariably the Gift of the Givers (if you want to help while staying home, donate to this incredible organisation). We need to be creating secular equivalents, and I have no doubt the younger generation are already on it (look at the heartening rise of bookclubs formed by and for black women, especially in Gauteng, as one of many examples). But they need support and signposts.
I would be absolutely stumped without my neighbours, folk with whom I share: a well; quantities of soup; wifi and sometimes a generator; and a CAT. My off-the-water-grid life would be much harder without them, and they’ve often enabled me to meet deadlines disrupted by loadshedding. But we needed something to break the ice — fortunately a certain fluffy and entitled personage made that possible. They tell me there’s tremendous satisfaction in (a) being part of a solution to a problem; and (b) feeling supported.
Meanwhile, tips on saving water and reducing waste STILL come my way, and they need to be shared. So on this blog, I’ll go on posting recipes, especially as folk stay home and poke around their pantries, looking for cheap and interesting things to do with the contents. But I’ll be assembling ideas for surviving this virus without losing our heads, coping with Eishkom darkness, but most of all: how to be better neighbours — how to pull together. So that will be the next book, coming once we launch my novel Charlotte in a rustle of petticoats. Send me your tips!
In the meantime, wash your hands, make your own hand sanitiser and disinfectants (Google will tell you how), take your Vitamin C, gargle regularly with gin and vodka (not the teetotalers, obz), stop buying up masks and other supplies genuinely sick people need, and get your ‘flu shots. Stay healthy if only to take stress off our health-care systems. As Prof Shireen Hassim says, “Despite the advice to keep a social distance, it is surely apparent now that our fate is closely bound to each other. We are global citizens. We need to build systems of mutual solidarity.”
And here is a picture of Lily, who crossed a picket fence and bonded two households together.
