Liquid life is a concept some Buddhist cultures had of the young and old, typically those under 6 and over 70, whose lives weren't seen as quite solid due to the greater likelihood of death at either end compared to the middle. This book discusses, among other things, some of the rituals involved in Buddhist Japan around the shift from liquid to solid and back again. But then things got much better for the littles.
I've used a life expectancy graph here a few times now that shows how our life expectancy has decreased significantly since Covid to make it clear that we're going through a seriously decimating crisis that's being largely ignored. But that's just the tail end of this graph below, which shows life expectancy over the last few centuries:
It's interesting to consider the differences that came in this very, very brief time in human history in which we successfully got most people to make it past 70. The lower life expectancies that came before the industrial revolution don't indicate that older people were dying off younger, but that more younger people didn't make it to old age. There are two things (at least) going on here: First, infant mortality improved dramatically thanks to better medical know-how and a huge thanks to sanitation AND vaccinations.
Secondly, workers started demanding rights and better working conditions. It was no longer acceptable to literally work people to death -- most people. I won't do a breakdown here, but in many times and places, the average life expectancy wasn't an indication of the length of life the "property-owners" (for lack of a better term) could expect. For instance Socrates drank hemlock at 70 as his friends tried to convince him to escape this untimely death, at a time when the average life expectancy was about 35. In civilizations with advanced sanitation, the propertied could expect to live about as long as we do, and the rest didn't count. Then ever so slowly we decided, as a collective, that rights to life and liberty shouldn't be tied to status but should be available to everybody!! Every individual has to count when we talk about rights.
Check out this 5 minute video explaining the history of human rights:
I abridged and recorded audio from this excellent video by Allversity that was just too long for my students to watch.
This is not just about Covid, although that's a big part of it. The CBC reported today that "Canada's slipping global ranking in infant deaths is a bright red warning flag about the state of the social safety net." The report includes loss of access to education, housing, food, and health care as causes for the decline. A secondary effect of the ongoing pandemic is the lack of doctors to help people, so many are going without a family doctor. The effects of a neoliberal agenda not included in the article include charging uninsured women $6,000 to book a cesearean section and making it easier to get MAiD than to pay the rent, and all signs that make it really feel like they want people to succumb to disease like making it difficult to access Paxlovid, making it impossible to find RATs or access PCR tests, restricting access to vaccination boosters to those at high risk to the point that 81% are over six months since their last booster (which means we're almost back to pre-vaccination times right now), and a few states and Canadian cities removing masks for healthcare workers, some of whom made some gleefully macabre Tiktoks to celebrate despite the continued pandemic.
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| This is a real headline. |
Biorisk consultant Conor Browne used the term Schrödinger's Pandemic to explain how healthcare workers have to openly acknowledge that covid is an important risk factor for disease and an ongoing danger to patients, yet at the same time are encouraged to believe they can't possibly be affected by it or affect those very patients as points of contamination. Dr. Lisa Iannattone compares it to telling HCWs to stop washing their hands as if C. difficile is over.
Is this a form of eugenics?? From a thread by @x3r0gxx (edited for clarity),
The current fashionable train of thought in infectious disease immunology - that the population's full immunological potential can only be achieved with perpetual mass infection - is not only eugenics hiding in plain sight but also the most exquisite example of groupthink I've ever witnessed. Everyone peddling this is a transparent careerist dependent on flattering and comforting one another for survival. None can point to any legitimate supporting sources for their claims, and, when evidence is presented which readily refutes them, they get either very quiet or very angry. And, of course, the only way the population could achieve immunity to an unfathomably infectious airborne disease is if all the vulnerable people were simply wiped out of genetic lines. It's literally just eugenics masquerading as mythical fairy tale stories of immunology. Zero justifications, zero science, zero examinations or acknowledgements of mechanisms or consequences, just a circlejerk of shamefully desperate, highly-credentialed lemmings trying to weasel their way into power and money via pacification of the masses toward untimely deaths.
They say groupthink, but it's reminiscent of doublethink: to believe in lies while knowing they're false.
Engineer Matthew Oliver pointed out yesterday, "If my bridges kept falling down, at what point would you stop listening to me demanding deference to my superior bridge knowledge? So how is it we have achieved as much excess death as wave 1, and yet nothing is being done to change course?" Getting Covid in the hospital can double your risk of mortality.
And PoP NB (Protect our Province: New Brunswick), posted this great bit about Manufactured Apathy, kissing cousin to Chomsky's manufactured consent, but instead of being manipulated to support some travesty the government's is perpetuating (war in Iraq, etc.), we're being manipulated to support their decision to do virtually nothing in the face of direct harm to their citizens.
For over a year, the province has been overtly nudging the public toward accepting mass infection and disregarding increasing debility and death. They do this by leveraging the public's belief in the myth of government protection. . . . Blind public trust is a potent tool, and it has been used effectively in NB to convince good people to not protect themselves, their families, or their communities from a crippling pathogen. But blind public trust does not come naturally. It requires cultivation. . . . If Covid-19 were fire, our government would be arsonists, and our province would be burning to the ground. We desearve prevention, education, and the means to extinguish this inferno of disease, disability, and death. The truth --> They've taken the battery out of the smoke alarm.
That nudging gets a huge boost with the normalization of deviance, that we get used to what used to be traumatic, ignoring the fires burning around us once they become regular occurrences. We lose the meaning and concern that, for instance, current wastewater levels of covid in Ontario are 20 times what they were at the lowest point in the pandemic. We should be horrified, but our minds acclimate.
The other side of this issue is the number of elderly dying earlier due to Covid, which is being accepted as inevitable despite it being preventable. These are often caregivers to young children, and their loss can also cause a tremendous strain on families as can Covid-caused disability.
It's a criminal act to fail to disclose HIV status if there is a realistic possibility of transmission, which is negated if a condom is used. But parents in a bind will send kids to school with a "cold" -- and there are lots of "colds" out there that just aren't getting better -- without explaining to their little one why they must wear a mask. And that misses that 1/3 of all cases are asymptomatic, so we should masks unless we can show we don't have it. In the U.S., there have been almost twice as many cumulative deaths from Covid in three years than AIDS in 40. And I've already talked about how much we do to protect kids with peanut allergies.
But this is affecting education more than just from rotating absences.
In Ontario schools, back in 2006, kids were prevented from leaving before 18 or graduation (whichever comes first) at a time when factories were outsourced. The province was adamant that a full 30 courses is necessary for each student, regardless their plans for the future, and denied a driver's licence to anyone who left early. McGuinty justified the move by insisting, "It's simply saying to our young people that it's no longer acceptable in a knowledge-based economy for you to drop out at the age of 16."
So what changed?
Now that Covid has killed off a significant number of workers, we're encouraging teenagers to leave school for the world of work to fill all the slots. But, at the same time, a tipping point of jobs no longer require human workers, so it's almost as if less connected people are becoming perceived as redundant human beings. From an economic perspective, we're hearkening back to the ancient or medieval world where the elites lived to 80 or so, but most everyone else died very young by today's standards, so maybe the new message is that ensuring the education of the generation of the future doesn't matter so much. If Covid continues running wild and is allowed to mix and match with other viruses, bacterias, and fungi coming down the pipe, living past 40 might be only for those with money, who can be assured that the types of buildings they have to enter are all "Davos safe."
We have to remember to be outraged at so many people unnecessarily disabled or dying because masks are kind of annoying despite the political elites and media working hard to placate us.
Or we just accept that we were fortuitous enough to live at a very rare moment in history when we briefly joined together, more or less, to try to enable a healthy long life for (nearly) everyone, and now we're back to holding the young and old and maybe also the middle aged to a more liquid life standard, expecting one other's demise at any moment.
Okay, it was never even that rosy, but it sure did get worse!
One more image to leave you with (and a song). "Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving at 900 miles an hour..."
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