The Actual War on Christmas

Here we go again…

Well, fuck. There goes another Christmas.

I’m writing this from London, where the Omicron variant is absolutely everywhere. These past few days the city has been gradually unpeopling. The coffee shop we go to every morning was almost empty, and that’s almost unheard of  - it’s a community hub - and at the end of the day they shut their doors. Everyone is sick, or knows somebody who is. Everything is muffled under a torch-through-a- blanket sky.  In retrospect, when a bunch of incompetent aristocrats promised us a staggering global catastrophe would be over by Christmas, we might have known not to believe them.

But we all needed this Christmas. We really did,  and we’ve waited so long.

Just when it felt like we were about to have a chance to celebrate, in the middle of all this darkness, it’s as if we’ve been trapdoored back to the start. Everyone’s scuppering their plans and cancelling longed-for reunions and treats and trips and all of the streets that were frantic with sparkling lights in the shop windows and rich with the smell of grease and booze and spice and hope are now so sad, and so quiet. We have to sit out another of the finite number of festive seasons we get in our lives. If the Omicron variant could only have waited a month. Even three weeks. Even a fortnight? Just for Christmas?

In case anyone hadn’t guessed, I love Christmas. Of course I love Christmas. I'm an embarrassingly earnest, painfully trusting catastrophe sugarplum of a person who still decorates with fairy lights all year round over a decade after college, because they look lovely, so there. I long ago made it a personal mission to single-handedly dispel the stereotype about unfestive Lefty humbugs and their war on Christmas. I especially love British Christmas, which given that we don’t do Thanksgiving is our entire holiday season rolled into one. It starts some time in mid November and has only a passing connection to Baby Jesus apart from him being in all the best songs, which I will be and have been playing constantly. Last year was the only Christmas I’ve spent far away from family. It’s a big deal.

So please understand how much it pisses me off to have to say that, yes, we all need to stay indoors and cancel our plans, again. Omicron is madly contagious. In London, hospitals are struggling to operate because so many of their staff are suddenly sick themselves. Omicron is so catching that in one 600-person club in Sydney, after one infected person attended, 200 people came down with it.

Either this is one hell of a variant or that’s one hell of a club.

That’s what’s coming, and the people who were heroes last time will do their best to be heroes again, but our infrastructure is exhausted, and our spineless self-dealing excuse for a government won’t officially impose any restrictions. Not even a mask mandate, not even with public health officials all but begging on  their knees for Johnson and his cabinet to take some sort of responsibility. They won’t do it because they can’t afford to furlough workers again, because they spent all the cash on their shabby Brexit deal. They won’t do it because they cannot bear to be disliked, and as a result, people are going to die.

Someday we’ll know how many lives have been wrecked, how many futures broken and families bereaved so that Boris could prat about playing Prime Minister. In the meantime, we’re almost up to a hundred thousand Covid Cases per day, and Christmas is coming, and we’re on our own. We’re doing our best to follow the official guidance as far as we can so we don’t pass on a crazy new flavour of Covid to our parents. Official restrictions, any sort of restrictions at all, would make it easier for the rest of  us to make hard, life-saving choices, but they would also make the poll numbers go down. People are going to die so that the Tories don’t have to do their actual jobs, and so Boris Johnson can spend a few more cringeworthy weeks enjoying great power without great responsibility. (Yes, I wanted to see the new Spider Man in the cinema, too. Can you tell?)

I was hanging on for this Christmas. Instead, here we are, feeling like we’ve been flung back in time to March 2020, when we had no idea what was coming, only that it was bad. And it’s not fair.

I know it’s not supposed to be fair. I know that on the scale of loss and trauma this is barely a crumb off the enormous failcake we’ve been asked to swallow. But it feels a bit like cosmic spite.

I’ve been thinking about sacrifice.

I’ve been thinking about how much some people have been asked to offer up, and how little others have been prepared to give, because the capacity to act collectively is now a political statement rather than a basic  survival principle. This week, Marie Le Conte wrote on Twitter about how people in their teens and twenties have given up irreplaceable years of their youth, and they’ve done it without much complaint, and nobody has really acknowledged it or told them they’ve done something brave and good. They’ve given up so much of the fun, and learning,and opportunity and excitement and stupid adventures and ill advised love affairs and all of the other silly essential things you’re meant to do in the crucial years after puberty but before your personal dignity

(ETA: Clearly, it’s reductive to talk about ‘young people’ and ‘clinically vulnerable people’ as though these were mutually exclusive groups. Plenty of people of all ages have chronic health issues or disabilities that make them extra precarious in this pandemic. For me some of the most useful and exciting theory about care right now is coming out of the disability justice movement, and that’s something I intend to explore in later posts. Thanks to @sorrelish for calling me in on this.)

Most of the time, when cultures speak in terms of sacrifice, when the young are asked to put their lives and futures on the line for the common good, we’re talking about war.  That’s the only framework we have for sacrifice, at least for sacrifice that’s acknowledged and respected rather than simply taken for granted. 

I’ve been thinking about sacrifice, and about how much of it young and young-ish people have had to make to protect the older and more vulnerable. Most young people are not afraid for their lives if they get COVID - even if they ought to be. There have obviously been huge disparities, but the amount that otherwise healthy younger people have sacrificed compared to perceived personal risk has been significant. Especially  if you consider the counter-example that has been set.

Collectively, millennials and zoomers have been giving up the most to protect other people, and they’ve not needed all that much persuading to do so- even though they are also the cohort most likely to be raising young children missing vital years of professional development, working insecure jobs that can’t offer them furlough, or exhausting already meager savings. And that’s before we get to the teenagers and college-age kids who have missed so much of the time they are meant to be taking risks and learning things and knocking off their sharp edges.

Two years of lockdowns have been brutal. They have done permanent damage. And yes, they were necessary. We now have longitudinal data to show that the sickness is definitely worse than the cure. That doesn’t mean that the cure hasn’t been horrendous, and it’s okay to say so.But what would happen if social consequences were more evenly distributed?

I hate to be the one to point it out, but over the past fifteen years our futures have been forever and irrevocably fucked by general refusal among those with any sort of stability to make sacrifices when it mattered most. I’m aware that this may make some people feel unfairly targeted, and I suggest you consider that being unable to tell the difference between an appeal to basic collective survival and personal insult is how we got into this mess.  We got into this mess because the old and white and rich and cowardly were unwilling to make sacrifices.  Because while the rest of us gritted our teeth and put up with indignity and heartache, people like Boris Johnson were lounging on their balconies, giggling at us over wine and cheese.

That attitude is why we’re going to have to wait a long time for a normal Christmas. Because nothing is going to be normal again. Because when it mattered, the people in charge decided it would be easier to carry on partying get future generations to clean up their mess. They elected a bunch of bellowing cave icons to fragile masculinity, whose ability to channel the narcissistic fury of mass race and gender panic is in inverse proportion to their ability to run anything except away from responsibility. It was the old and rich and white and scared and smug who decided they would rather burn the world than share it and still, with another wave of deadly virus sweeping away their authority, they flap about like the worst thing that could happen to them is to be accurately described. 

My partner, with whom I have now been locked down in three cities in three separate hemispheres, asked me today a question I think a lot of us have been handling with caution in case it cracks and ruins our moral fabric-

When do we just say fuck it and throw up our hands?

I’m not saying anyone should. I’m certainly not planning to. I’m just saying that the sacrifice people are making ought to be acknowledged. The trivial, precious moments and the memories we never got to make and the goodbyes we never got to say and the daily exhausting overheads of living in permanent uncertainty and isolation. The erosion of whatever stability and good health we’d actually managed to scrape together after fourteen years of watching our collective future smashed into bits and fed to the dying embers of finance capitalism, and still we stayed indoors and made bread. Even I made bread. I got into bidding on neon golf jumpers on Ebay. I have enough jumpers now and everything is still absolute chaos.

Of course we’re going to do the right thing, but it would be very, very good if everyone didn’t just assume that from the off, as if tolerating hardship were somehow normal, as if  it came easily to us as if we just lay the stuff that matters to us on the altar of avoidable empathy as easily as a cabinet minister lies.

Obviously, we’re going to do the right thing, but it would be nice to have that right thing acknowledged. It would be nice to think that our lives matter, and it matters that we’ve given up part of them to save strangers.

And before anyone starts, yes, it’s fine to want to see people praised for doing the right thing and patted on the back for basic decency. Are you kidding me? Praise is not a scarce resource. Of course we should celebrate each other, especially when we’re doing something really hard like being deliberately unselfish when selfishness is a pillar of the rickety knockoff excuse for a moral framework late capitalism gave us after it spent our generational inheritance trying to fuck the sky. 

It is not trivial to do the right thing when you’ve been raised huffing the fumes of toxic individualism in a zombie capitalist culture where everyone who’s supposed to be in charge is convinced the human race is something you can win by cheating. Yes, it is hard to do the right thing, yes we’re going to do it anyway, and yes, that means that things are going to have to change. It means redistribution or consequences in the short term, and respect right now.

Because there are two meanings of the word ‘sacrifice’. One describes the sort of sacrifice we choose to make for others, out of love, for the good of our community and our species. And the other describes a goat on an altar. It describes deliberate, selfish destruction of other lives in a cowardly attempt to protect your own. 

That’s the sort of sacrifice our leaders think they are making.  They’re wrong, and I think before long they’ll find that out.

In the meantime, I plan to be as merry as humanly possible. I refuse to wait for the world to return to normal. I’m going to do everything I can to celebrate everyone I know and how much we’ve all been through without actually putting anyone else in danger. I’m going to play chaotic online games with my friends. I’m going to make a pudding and blast out carols and get day-drunk on mulled wine and be merry as hell. Because otherwise it’s going to be always Winter and never Christmas.