Pandemic Reveals the Inadequacies of our Trusted Institutions
Our current support systems are no longer sufficient to meet the challenges of our time.
It is three weeks into the new year, which is enough time to wrap my head around the dumpster fire that was 2020 and adjust my expectations for what I can realistically hope for in 2021. After the past 12 months, the possibility of simply going to a movie beckons with the allure once reserved for a first class airline ticket to Paris.
My family did not celebrate New Year’s Eve. I spent it tucked in bed with ice cream watching Bridgerton; my daughter spent it online with the friends she hasn’t seen since March; my husband spent it working. There was nowhere to go, no one to invite over and very little to celebrate (beyond being alive and healthy, and celebrating that publicly seems insensitive at best).
I personally was feeling very blue. A year at home provides a lot of time for quiet reflection and my free rein musings coupled with 24/7 news reading resulted in a wave of disillusionment and hopelessness. For in addition to dealing out widespread illness, death and unemployment, the pandemic has starkly revealed just how weak the societal structures we have unconsciously trusted to protect us for decades really are.
As the virus spread across Canada and the United States, it didn’t just lay waste to our finances and health. It shone a strobe light on our failing institutions, exposing deep fissures some people previously suspected and even fewer talked about; the majority were oblivious as they scurried through the rat’s maze of their lives towards their expected reward at its end. This year showed us that more often than not the game is rigged, the prize merely an illusion created by the maze-makers to benefit them more than us.
Institutions overwhelmed
We saw hospitals unable to cope with the rapid influx of patients, the consequence of decades of Conservative austerity that gutted their ability to respond to a crisis. After years of laying off medical staff, cutting hours and salaries, these same employees were suddenly held up as “heroes” by the very governments that once sneered at their requests for fair working conditions and pay. MPs led rousing cheers for all the immigrant labourers keeping our food chains moving, the same labourers that the western world had spent the previous four years trying to kick out of their countries.
In Quebec and Ontario we saw long-term care residences, private for-profit enterprises that charge residents between $3,000 and $7,000 a month, suddenly unable to care for the cascading number of sick and dying seniors as the virus spread like wildfire through their overcrowded, understaffed and poorly ventilated buildings. Entrance doors were locked and family members forbidden to enter as management tried to simultaneously save their residents and mitigate their liability.
Their pandemic preparedness was woefully out of date and there was a severe shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), both from lack of availability and the fact that the majority of residents’ fees went to paying profits to shareholders instead of maintaining their services and equipment. At the Residence Herron in Dorval, Quebec several of the staff, afraid of getting sick, abandoned their charges and 33 elderly residents died, their last moments no doubt full of confusion, pain and terror.
We saw politicians ignore science and expert recommendations, more concerned with safeguarding their power and wealth than in protecting their constituents. The growing partisan divide between political parties kept our elected officials from working together to protect the public. Many denied any advice that would cost them votes or money. They awarded PPE contracts to their friends and took secret trips abroad, all while telling us not to travel or have family over for Christmas because it wasn’t “safe.”
A global crisis that should have brought humanity together instead gave strength to the current “us vs them” mentality throughout our political spectrum that continues to cost lives. In the U.S., the fail-safes built into their Constitution to protect the country from authoritarianism showed their fallibility as Trump and his criminal cronies flaunted their corruption with no repercussion, and Americans were forced to admit that their laws are only as dependable as the person charged with upholding them.
Politicians follow personal agendas instead of science
Here in Canada we did a pretty respectable job of crushing the first wave. But now the second wave is crushing us. After sitting at home for 10 months people are fed up and missing their families. Inconsistent government directives are creating confusion and are not being followed by some of the very people laying down the laws, which causes anger and breeds defiance. Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford ordered schools and small businesses closed but allowed big box stores to stay open, and bored residents flocked to them. Several months of vainly asking people to stay home with no result forced Ford to put Ontario in lockdown again until February.
While Prime Minister Trudeau negotiates for vaccines and provides financial support for Canadians dealing with illness and unemployment, the Conservative and NDP leaders are busy posting false statements about our vaccine stores and the ineffectiveness of the rollout schedule in an effort to use this crisis to their political advantage. Anti-maskers are invading public spaces in a misguided protest for “freedom”, shouting about their “medical exemption” with a velocity of lung power your average asthmatic can only dream of. Members of the far-right are using this pandemic to spread disinformation and fear in an effort to further their own agendas; the recent attack on the U.S. capital was a shocking example of how their influence is spreading.
Our society is divided between those who put people before money and those who put money before people, and sadly it appears to be an almost 50–50 ratio.
The pandemic is wreaking havoc with our health, finances and lives. Distraught families are forced to say goodbye to their loved ones over Zoom on an iPad held by a nurse and can’t hold a funeral and grieve with their family. I am thankful neither my husband nor any of my children have contracted Covid; I have so far been spared the wretched horror of having any of my loved ones taken from me, even temporarily.
I acknowledge we are extremely privileged to be able to stay home; this is due more to employment and school circumstances than money. My daughter attends school online and my job as a legal secretary continued from home without missing a single day. My husband though, a home renovator and local handyman, didn’t work for 7 months. We are skating on thin ice financially but the CERB saved us from ruin.
With President Biden newly sworn in and making fighting the pandemic his first order of business, this period of history could allow us to make sweeping changes for the greater good, if we have the courage and collective will to take advantage of it. COVID has inspired many to denounce decades of rote opinion and finally embrace real conversations about the current state of living wages, student debt, racial inequality and universal health care. Many previous naysayers are ready to admit the days of pulling oneself up by their own bootstraps are over and to look outside the box for bold new solutions.
Government frustrated with pace of vaccine rollout
The rollout has been slow and disorganized, but Toronto and Halton County announced this week they have finished the first round of immunizations at their LTC homes. Phase 2 should start soon; Phase 3, where the general population will finally have access, isn’t expect to start until April with a hoped-for target of all who want a vaccination receiving one by September. Prime Minister Trudeau offered military assistance to the provincial premiers to speed the process along but that august body, the majority of whom would rather kiss a rabid skunk than ask Trudeau for help, have made no official request.
I have not personally felt much anxiety about being exposed to COVID until recently. My youngest child will be leaving for college in the fall and I want her fully immunized before she leaves, but I’m wondering if she will get her turn in time. I expected to see a military campaign that included country-wide mobile vaccination sites and a rallying of the general public along the lines of an election day to get as many people treated in the shortest possible time. Instead, all we have are manipulated reports of vaccine shortages and threats from Ford to invade the Pfizer CEO’s “ying-yang” with holiday-themed explosives.
The first month of 2021 is almost over. In the past 12 months more than 80 million people have been ill and at least 1.7 million have died. The virus is in every country except for six island nations in the South Pacific (Palau, Micronesia, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa and Tonga). Approximately 7 billion people wait more-or-less patiently for their vaccination. A return to normal, we are told, is on the horizon.
So we continue to wait. Time, and our lives, stand still.
