Wise words from women: Build back better
This pandemic will lead us to break with the past and try something new
As we negotiate this week’s emotions and its additional grief and shock over Nova Scotia, our fatigue is deepening, it seems to me.
What I do is relish the words of three women of wisdom: one, a Jewish woman in America, Rebecca Solnit, who habitually counsels hope in the dark; another, a Christian in India whose father was Hindu, and who won the Booker prize for fiction in 1997 with “The God of Small Things,” Arundhati Roy; and the third, an African-American poet named Sonya Renee Taylor.
Finding them has been salve for my soul. The comfort found in reading is called bibliotherapy. I rejoice when I see my grandchildren finding it out.
Rebecca Solnit wrote recently in The Guardian, an English newspaper:
“As we struggle to learn the science and statistics of this terrible scourge, our psyches are doing something equivalent, adjusting to profound social and economic changes, studying the lessons which disasters teach, and equipping ourselves for an unanticipated world.”
Ah, this might explain my fatigue. Overload. Unfamiliar territory. Maybe it’s worse for those of us accustomed to extensive planning! As the current witticism says: “Introverts, look in on your extrovert friends. Unlike you, they don’t know how to handle this!”
Roy, now deeply involved in Indian politics, writes: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice and data banks, our dead ideas and dead rivers and smoky skies. Or we can walk through lightly with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
In a domestic parallel, a lot of people I know are using the days to clean out drawers and attics and sheds, giving away or discarding things. It’s a beneficial practice for minds, too, and attachments. And ambitions. Ambitions for larger, faster, more modern, more impressive things.
These thinkers point to a break with the past, and breaks are always disorienting. But the same-old, same-old isn’t going to save us either. I’ve been involved in international development for 50 years. The world, ever shrinking, is not a fair one. There is massive wealth and massive poverty; overaccumulation and scarcity.
I once asked an expert what standard of living would be required for everyone to live decently. “Pre-war England,” he replied. “Apartment living, public transport, daily, small shopping.” Does that mean no Walmart, Costco, monster homes, three-car garages, annual plane flights to warm places? Maybe so.
My third reference these days is poet Taylor. She is blunt. “We will not go back to normal: our pre-corona existence normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, confusion, rage, hoarding and hate. We have been given the opportunity to stitch a new garment that fits all of humanity and nature.”
There is really no debate now that, after this health crisis, the earth herself must be regarded and tended with a whole new attitude.
The $100 billion which the Canadian government has pledged for relief of citizens who have lost their jobs includes some inklings of a green new deal: money for the decommissioning of thousands of “orphan” oil wells marring the Alberta landscape. Let’s hope that our minister for the environment, British Columbian Jonathan Wilkinson, has a pre-eminent place at the cabinet table.
Just as we women have fought for and largely achieved at the federal level anyway, the application of a gender lens to all legislation, there must be an environmental lens for all expenditures from now on.
Breakdown gives us a chance for breakthrough.