Managing the Unknown: Assume All & Everything – A BRIEF BRIEF by Gnome Chompskwe*
April 12, 2020[1]
MANAGING THE UNKNOWN/UNSEEABLE: FIRST ORDINANCE[2] - ASSUME ALL & EVERYWHERE –Gnome Chompskwe*
Except for South Korea, all governments have risked lives with half-baked risk management practices. When we don't know/see the cause, spread, & who has it, we must ASSUME EVERYONE & EVERYTHING. Whether we know a lot or a little about the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, we knew from the beginning it attacks the lungs. The first ordinance should have been: everyone masked.
I can only imagine the kind of pressure leaders are under, but speed is not better than being correct. Take a breath. Reach out for critical perspectives on risk management: people who’ve criticized the business model of risk management’s use in health crises where people could die. The novel coronavirus is not about the risk management of business. Responses should not be about losing money here or there if we do "X": it’s about human lives. We can raise money, but we can’t raise the dead.
That the inability to distinguish between the two has sullied the entire approach to this is due, I submit, to the unexamined worldviews of these leaders: liberal, conservative, or transformative. Liberals seem myopic to the problem. They think a tweak here or there will fix the problem. They don’t see that the problem is the system itself. Conservatives don’t see any problems – a rational market, guided by a magical invisible hand is taking care of everything – it is, after all, working just fine for them.[3] Transformative thinkers see the problems yet, from my experience, they are also submerged and imprinted in a western capitalist patriarchal bureaucratic gestalt. They bear no malice; they have just been led to believe that what is good for them is good for everyone. Most significant is that they apply this to organizing. That is, they organize to get things done as if their way to get things done is the only way. The top down bureaucratic model also leads, for the purpose of speed, to creating solutions without asking the right questions.
Guided like most by the experiences of their formative years, they’ve struggled through those experiences and, like all facing scarcity, have scarcity needs-based fear. Combined with another rarely examined point-of-view – that we are inherently competitive, and that competition and conflict are natural to humans. Their well-being in the world and the systems they organize in, are precarious. They can’t imagine what they can’t imagine; they have trouble sharing power; and, repeat “one-type-of-shoe-fits-all” approach to organizing. These methods, more often than not fail and, while not fatal to them, are fatal to those less privileged - (we are privileged if we can flip a switch for light and turn on a tap for water: billions of people can’t.)[4] Much of this privilege is garnered by the parasitic nature of the exchange/accumulation economy on the gift economy. (The gift economy is based in relationships: its directive is providing for needs by caring and looking after each other.) The ‘proof-in-the-pudding’ of the parasitic nature of capitalist patriarchy is evidenced by the utter clarity of our dependence on health care providers and food providers – those most tied in with basic household maintenance, while we adapt to the novel coronavirus. These are the people most cared for by us by mandatory mask-wearing and, where possible, physical distancing.
Feet on The Ground: Under an “ASSUME ALL & EVERYWHERE” policy model, it’s relatively easy to monitor mandatory masking – masks are either on or off. Whether through hospitals, doctors, local pharmacy, LCBO, or mailed to us much like we receive our income tax, license renewal or municipal notices, or, we make our own - everyone gets a mask.[5] It’s about protecting others, masks are as much about keeping it in not keeping it out. We acknowledge the need for the very highest protection for health care workers and at the same time recognize where folks can easily distance and a non N95 even a home-made version would suffice. The identity of anyone not wearing a mask is collected and they are given a mask. In other words, we treat everyone like they don’t have the capacity to form the intent to not wear a mask – we work with them. There is no new criminalization. Criminalization involves intent. Intent based actions are already covered in the Federal Criminal Code; however, a second non-masked citation, would engage sanctions. This doesn’t have to mean jail or fines: perhaps something community designed. All of this is combined with physical distancing.
With this ‘managing-the-unknown’ approach’, leads to less exposure for health workers and all of us from the beginning – less transmission, fewer patients.
In conclusion: It is far easier to manage what you can see than what you can’t see. Masks are seen - their absence clear: the novel coronavirus is unseen - see it everywhere.
* From Gnome Chompskwe’s Critical Musings, a Blog by D.M. Lafortune. See: www.horizondancer.com or www.decolonizingtheheart.org for more info.
[1] The idea of writing this peace began in mid-December when I first heard of the virus. However, I was in a surgical ward and was not in a position to begin writing until the second week of January. I recorded notes to myself hoping the government would take this approach. When they didn’t and continued to wobble on the mask issue, I thought it time. I wore a mask on my subsequent post-surgical visits beginning December 25 – my surgeon and other health care workers supported the logic of my decision.
[2] A reference to “lasting ordinance” in Exodus 12:14. In a guided conversation I’ll be leading, I propose that the “lasting ordinance” is good social policy. I argue that it has scientific foundations and it is their faith that supports people’s ability to follow the lasting ordinance.
[3] I wouldn’t put it beyond extreme conservatives to postulate that the loss of human life is a cull of the less worthy – the social Darwinist approach. It’s convenient for them to totally ignore the historic exclusion and marginalization of those most vulnerable to meaningful participation in civil society. The power to make the rules about who gets to make the rules on who is or isn’t excluded has its history in liberalism. White men with property made the rules centuries ago. Liberals and transformers understand the structured inequality that is the legacy of that process but the growing middle-class, wanted what the elite had. This is a combination that welcomes the erasure of memory and history. Conservatives, on the other hand, are conscious proponents of “everything has a place” and the rules were created to keep people in their place. As some of them are learning, Mother Nature’s invisible little friends are much more powerful than the invisible hand of the market.
[4] I’m hoping and seeing that these circumstances, are causing many to rethink our values and our way of organizing. In current times, the management of the household (economics), is falling disproportionately on low-paid, part-time workers. It is no coincidence that so many of the front-liners are underpaid part-time workers – this is part and parcel of the feminization of poverty: the devaluation, by the misogyny of patriarchy, that which is female and designated “like-female”, feminized and also devalued. These “feminine” skills are highly valued now. These are the skills and values that have been nursed and nurtured for centuries. It is how we survived as a species and, I pray get us through this. It sure beats starting a war.
[5] The novel coronavirus is a global issue. As such, it falls to the federal government as a residual and emergency power.
See: Fort Francis Pulp & Power Co. v. Man. Free Press Co., [1923] A.C. 965, for a discussion on emergency situations which change the nature of the powers being exercised. See: Reference Re Anti-Inflation Act, [1976] 2 S.C.R. 373 at 391], for a discussion of what constitutes an emergency and the limits on federal powers.
The federal government’s power to deal COVID-19 as a “matter of national concern”. Locke J. in Johannesson v. West St. Paul, [1952] 1 S.C.R. 292, [1951] 4 D.L.R. 609 stated: It is an activity, which to adopt the language of Lord Simon in the Attorney General for Ontario v. Canada Temperance Federation, must from its inherent nature be a concern of the Dominion as a whole. The field of legislation is not, in my opinion, capable of division in any practical way.