This week's Independent News & Media Irish regional newspapers' column.
Michael Commane
These are strange times. I’ll be 71 this year, which means I’m cocooned. Indeed, jokingly I have been sending text messages to people signing off, ‘Yours sincerely, The Old Cocooner’.
The media is full of advice as to how we can manage during this time of emergency.
One thing is for sure, we all want to stay alive and we want others too to stay alive. It’s vitally important we adhere to the medical advice that is being given to us by State agencies.
Last Sunday week the finance minister of the German state of Hesse, Thomas Schäfer died by suicide. His body was found on a high speed rail track near Frankfurft-am-Main.
The premier of Hesse Volker Bouffier said that Schäfer had been very concerned about the Covid-19 pandemic and that he had been working day and night on the crisis and the subsequent financial aspects.
Bouffier said that Schäfer was pessimistic about how it would be possible to manage the financial situation in Germany post Covid-19.
Jair Bolsonaro, the President of Brazil and his counterpart in Belarus Alexander Lukashenko refuse to believe the seriousness of the situation.
Indeed, Lukashenko has said that vodka and saunas will ward off Covid-19.
Donald Trump too, up to quite recently, had been denying the scourge of this virus. That’s the man who said last week that the population of Seoul is 38 million. The population is in fact 9.9 million. But the city is 38 metres above sea level.
Isn’t the behaviour of far-right leaders odd?
There’s a worldwide lurch to the right over the last number of years.
Last week I listened to a talk of Noam Chomsky on YouTube where he compared Trump’s rallies to those of Hitler.
Chomsky is an American philosopher and commentator on social affairs.
He argues that the world has been highjacked by neoliberals who are beholden to the markets, large corporations and financiers. Chomsky points out that polio was solved by the intervention of government, who ordered the pharmaceutical companies to play ball.
He believes that had laboratories been given the necessary resources to do their work properly we would not be where we are today. He goes on to say that there are many civilisational crisis ahead of us but that Covid-19 might bring people to ask what kind of a world we want.
He believes the world is in need of a complete change of our current economic system.
He is concerned about the world’s nuclear stockpile and the looming environmental catastrophe. Chomsky argues that the future lies in democracy and that governments can never be beholden to the markets.
Governments are exclusively answerable to the people.
A dog barks during the interview. Then later on, the interviewer asks Chomsky if that is his dog, to which he smiles and says yes, and then he is asked if there is a parrot in the room. Chomsky smiles and tells the interviewer that his parrot says: ‘sovereignty to all the people’, and quips that that is better than the wisdom of Washington.
The link to the Chomsky talk is:
In these unprecedented days keep yourself busy, be engaged. There’s so much to do. A young girl in my class one day said to another student: ‘The only people who bore us are ourselves’. I thought they were very wise words.
There’s loads to do. We need to get to it. And keep an eye out for those who are vulnerable and more fragile than the rest of us.
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