For Victorians this last week has been taxing. It began with rising numbers of COVID-19 infections, moved to the lock-down of housing commission towers enforced by hundreds of police and has continued with the lockdown of the whole Melbourne area for six weeks and exclusion from other States.
The challenge is to find compass bearings in such an unpredictable situation, and so how to respond to the flood of exhortation, complaint and blame that has accompanied it. Although it is notoriously difficult on a storm-tossed deck to take accurate readings, the attempt may encourage us to improve on our initial responses.
It is important first to understand in broad terms the situation in which we find ourselves. To my mind — and this is true not just of Victoria but of the nation — we now live above all in insecurity. In coronavirus we are faced with a microbe that we do not fully understand, which threatens the life and health of those whom it infects, to which there is no antidote nor sure treatment, and to which our responses will affect unpredictably our economic and social life. In the face of this we cannot confidently predict or plan for our future as individuals nor as a society. For the foreseeable future insecurity is our home.
Insecurity takes many forms. Most obviously it expresses itself in anxiety and paralysis in the face of the uncertain choices we must make in everyday life. More subtly and perhaps commonly it leads to denial. The most blatant form of denial is to say that the virus won’t affect me and that I can safely do what I choose without bothering about it. The more common form is to convince ourselves that the situation can be controlled if we only do this or that, and then we can all get on with life as before.
These voices can be heard loudly in the response to the Victorian situation. They shout that the outbreak was clearly someone’s fault, could easily have been avoided and handled better. It was a failure of control. All we need to do is to avoid those mistakes and so get back to business as usual.
The vehemence and certainty with which those judgments are made betray inner insecurity. They silence the small voice that asks whether the armour with which we protect ourselves against the virus is like the Emperor’s new clothes in the fairytale.
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