Antonio Navalón
Since the beginning of time, governments have served – with greater or lesser effectiveness and for better or worse – for many things. In addition to being entities in charge of imposing order, collecting taxes, and exercising legitimate violence – which is done in the name of the State – they have also had the functions of administering and ordering our lives. For the figure of governments to exist, there must have been a need for a leadership that knew or was capable of guiding or even keeping things more or less under control. From the beginning until today, fear has been a fundamental cause for exercising power. The problem is that fear, or that part of power, has a law that cannot be broken: governments breathe fear and are the ones who must seek to eradicate it, not those who produce it. However, today, in the face of anxiety and panic attacks that they do not know how to manage, much less how to counteract, governments have not even learned how to transmit the slightest sense of peace and stability to their people.
As history progresses and the times we live in are looked at with perspective, we will discover that there has never been an anarchist revolutionary who has overthrown more governments and destroyed more bourgeois ways of life than Covid-19 is managing to do. Albert Einstein once said: “there are two infinite things: human stupidity and the universe. And about the universe, I am not sure”. Today – given what we have seen – this theory could not be more right, since if anything is true, it is that human beings have not been able to prove the opposite after so many years of existence. Therefore, it is not surprising that once again – with this short-sightedness, lack of solidarity, and lack of intelligence on the part of humans – we were so naive as to think that by vaccinating ourselves, making vaccine cocktails, putting on masks, and locking ourselves up wherever the white man steps, would be enough to be safe.
For example, the 24.3% of the population vaccinated in South Africa is a figure that in itself is a warning and confirmation that we do not have a solution. The governments that, faced with the emergence of new variants, run in panic, closing and opening their borders, banning flights, putting people in hotels for the time being – since who knows how long it will take before quarantines are carried out in prisons – is proof that we have not learned anything from what we have lived through. The only thing they are demonstrating with these measures is that, first, they are entirely overwhelmed by the circumstances. And second, it shows that they have lost the moral authority to call themselves our governments.
Our leaders; those who are most afraid of us; those who do not know what to do; and those who demonstrate that so many trillions of dollars invested and squeezed from their people have been of no use once they have shown that they do not have the capabilities to face the challenges of tomorrow. But, above all, they have made us see that they cannot be the ones to save us from this battle. With each passing day and with each new variant that emerges, a struggle is acquiring more violent and tragic characteristics than the Second World War. In his time, Winston Churchill could only offer his people blood, sweat, and tears and the promise that they would never surrender, that they would fight in the squares, on the beaches, in the cities, or even from their homes. When we see their behavior, we begin to question where the head of those we pay them to administer us, defend us, put the order in our lives, and exercise that increasingly strange word called Government.
How is it possible that within the whole white or yellow universe, no one realized that if we had one and a half billion unvaccinated people of color sooner rather than later, the danger would come in the form of the Omicron? As I write this column, no one knows exactly what the true extent of this new variant will be, although what we can be sure of is that the system we trusted so much has failed. What we also know is that this variant has awakened and rekindled fear in our world and that as a result of its emergence, we have once again lost all the trust we could have had and the fact that we cannot even aspire to have an accurate parameter that would allow us to have an idea of the ultimate consequences of the Omicron. Will this new variant kill us faster and without fever or headache? Will vaccines be of any use?
Personally, I believe that this 21st century – supposedly the one that was called to be the century of knowledge – is the most ignorant in the recent history of humankind. We have information, but we have neither education nor culture. We know many things, but we do not know what to do with what we know. Watching the spectacle of governments fleeing in terror, not knowing what to do, is an unprecedented situation that will live on in the memory of humanity. If it had fallen to the first revolutionaries, anarchists, and Bolsheviks to live in a similar situation, they would probably have already built a gigantic monument to Covid-19. This bug alone has destroyed more governments, structures, and health systems than any other movement, event, or historical fact.
In any case, what Covid-19 has shown is that we have no solution. No matter how many times we vaccinate once, twice, three times, or however many times it takes, no one knows how this will end. The only good thing about Omicron – if it is as lethal as it seems – is that in addition to taking all governments by the scruff of the neck, it will get even the inhabitants of the Netherlands up and out on the streets. For us, the poor victims of Covid-19, victims of the Government, and victims of panic attacks by those who govern us, it seems that our death is quicker and less painful. After all, after the two most repeated words of the 21st century have become “Covid-19” and “vaccine,” it is still unclear whether they will really help to cope with the virus born in Wuhan, China.
While many governments in the East and West live in panic attacks, there are others – such as Mexico’s – that could give universal lessons of fortitude or at least of apparent immunity to the consequences of the pandemic. Ever since the Undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion, Hugo Lopez-Gatell, took it upon himself to make us see that the President was safe from Covid-19 because of his moral strength and because he was a moral reference, we have lived constantly confused in the face of the facts shown by science, wills and political decisions. While the world tries to know how far the challenge and the problems and the scope of Omicron will go, the Mexican Government – with its President at the head – summoned hundreds of thousands of people without any protection to the main square of Mexico, the Constitution Square, and the so-called Zocalo to celebrate the third anniversary of its coming to power.
The lists of the dead in Mexico are still confusing, although what is a fact is that we have a high mortality rate and that it is higher than many countries in the world. However, in that so-called moral belt of strength that is sometimes wielded by those scientifically and medically responsible for fighting the pandemic, surely there must be the strength to protect what it means on paper, and if one were in Mexico and if one did not have the belief that one has in the current Government, in doing the opposite of what circumstances – and if Omicron is finally so deadly – would advise doing. But who said fear? The moral belt of historical certainty of the 4T protects the President’s followers or at least makes their cause of death not from the inevitable contagion. It makes their death by faith, by conviction, and by ideology.
Do not panic. What will be, will be. Be a believer; it is all written in the stars. But, in the meantime, when you prepare your tax return; when you go to give your money to the Government – the one that does not protect you and does not know how to protect you and that does not know how to assimilate or be cold-blooded enough to fight intelligently – ask yourself just one question. All the money you have given for so long and will continue to give in the form of taxes or other forms of collection, what good has it done or will do?
We have reached a point where we need to know whether the funds we have given our governments will be used to build more hospitals, whether they will be used to continue paying the pharmaceutical companies that make and distribute vaccines – and who are also the real winners in this situation – or whether those funds will be used to build a world in which we can finally regain faith in something or someone. To create a world in which the word government has meaning again. A world in which, in the event of the inevitable sinking, the first to jump ship is not the captain. For the moment, unfortunately, we can only see governments in panic. Governments in which, before the boat reaches the depths of the sea, its captains will have already abandoned the helm.
