False Positive

Our Cultural Traditions and Norms Could Kill Us

I am really worried that in SL our ‘island mentality’ and relaxed and convivial social norms means that a vast amount of the population do not understand how important it is to change their cultural habits of closeness and community gatherings (both family and religious) immediately. These traditions might kill them. And us.

The rest of the world is really of not much significance to people with an exclusively local mindset. Nationalism and patriotism which are good in themselves taken too far mean that most people feel that the rest of the world and its happenings do not and will not affect us. Interconnectedness and exponential numbers and pandemics and actions which must be taken to ‘flatten the curve’ are hard to conceptualise without the language to put it into words.

We are proud of our high level of literacy, but that is literacy in Sinhala, and this virus is international, universal and global. And most of the effective warnings and sound medical advice coming in from the countries who have first dealt with it are conveyed in English. These must be translated now, immediately, and the messages conveyed through visual images so everyone can understand them. Island wide, in every form of media.

To survive this pandemic with minimal losses, our beloved lifestyle of sun and sea and social vibrancy and inter-connectivity has to change. Principles of the laws of causality (cause and effect, how every action has a consequence) need to be understood. Social distancing, proven to be the most effective limit to the spread of this virus, is alien to our culture. People are tactile, and show support and affection through physical proximity. It is not going to be easy to change this mindset.

Everyone has to say: ‘I am sorry, but we have to not see each other in person, for a while.’ Children who were at school in their hundreds until a few days ago, with dozens of kids in large tuition classes, and adults in social gatherings and business summits and meetings, are likely to possibly have been in contact with people who unknowingly have carried this. I have been reading up on it daily, seeing what happens in other countries compared to SL. The culture here is very social, enmeshed and inter- generational, and it is impossible to stop people being in contact with each other just by advising them to do so. They do not as a whole understand the numbers, or the urgency.

We must think back two weeks from the first declared cases: Where were we? What were we doing? Who did we see? And they say that the incubation period may be longer than 2 weeks. More like 3.

We cannot take any risks now.

I saw on Twitter 2 days ago, the comment that: ‘Pettah is full of people. In supermarkets entire families are shopping accompanied by little ones and grandparents too. The TV showed some religious gatherings with many elderly people participating. Very few are practising social distancing by keeping a metre apart’.

I am happy to report that when I went grocery shopping yesterday at the local Food City, the shelves were well-stocked and all essentials were in good supply. No one was pushing or shoving, as we have seen people doing in other countries. The staff wore gloves and masks. But the security guards outside were not wearing the masks properly, some covering only their mouths but not their noses.

This kind of haphazardness of preventative implementation is completely eclipsed, however, by the criminal moral ignorance and unforgivable unconcern displayed by those who have attended large communal gatherings in the past two weeks, with information about the spread of this illness and its high level of contagion widely available to them.

Whether gathering for religious reasons at festivals to pray for their families and country, or to celebrate brotherhood and camaraderie and sentimental traditions at 3-day sporting matches, it is clear that the numbers of those infected explode after events like these. In the name of personal pleasure, and of spiritual sanctity, our fellow citizens and their compulsions are about to inflict unwanted damage on us.

Even this for me paled in comparison to the news that there were citizens returning from Italy last week, blatantly lying to immigration authorities about their place of departure, to avoid quarantine detainment, careless of the consequences to their families, friends and the doctors who they expect to look after them when they fall ill, and think they are having heart failure because they cannot breathe. Their highly developed sense of personal survival far outstrips their sense of collective responsibility.

The entire medical staff of a large hospital are now in quarantine instead of being able to assist, at this critical juncture. It is obvious that the medical staff need community support: not only in the form of understanding of citizens  of their own crucial personal role in limiting the spread of the virus, but also in terms of our collective awareness that this crisis will take some time to pass, and in the meantime doctors, nurses, and all other medical staff need equipment: especially respiratory equipment, and supplies of personal protective gear. Not only in the short term, but in the mid to long term. They are most at risk of getting ill, because they will be most exposed to those who are ill, and for prolonged periods of time. A community funded and supported supply chain would be a wonderful creation, with social service enterprise groups, online activist groups and philanthropic individuals all contributing.

On a social level, the medical staff in every hospital will be working round the clock, and they will need food and drink and sleep in order to be healthy enough to care for those who will fall ill. It is a slow-breaking and terrible tsunami they are facing, as the numbers of those who are infected rise and start to explode.

Community groups who are assisting the elderly, immuno-compromised and less able amongst us by shopping for groceries and essential medicines for them must be supported. It is time to be vigilant on behalf of those most vulnerable, and to serve and protect them. All the things we proudly celebrate in our culture: the importance of family, the love and concern for our children, our compassion for our fellow human beings, our pride in our nation, our concern for the suffering of those in trouble, have to be translated into direct action, now. Or the words will be empty and the hospitals (and cemeteries) will be full.

It is unfortunate and ironic that many of those celebrating so joyfully at sporting events are highly likely to be ardent patriots, sincerely devoted to their families, schools, and formative institutions, and all round good people, thronging temples and churches and kovils and mosques, and sporting stadiums and arenas, in numbers at every gathering of the faithful.

Not knowing is not as bad as not caring. But both levels of unawareness of the vital - and viral - connection between self and society may prove disastrous.

Our collective ignorance about these issues has - until now - been merely frustrating. From this week, it could be fatal.

Touch Me Not

There’s a fascinating flowering plant known as ‘the touch me not’, whose leaves curl up for a few moments in self defence when you touch them. It is also known as ‘The Sensitive Plant’. The Romantic poet Shelley wrote a poem about it, likening its behaviour to that of the soul of the poet.

Two hundred years before Shelley, Shakespeare’s King Lear had also practised some marked social distancing: in his case, rejecting the kind comradeship of his dear and loyal friend, The Earl Of Gloucester. Gloucester, accused of treason for aiding and abetting Lear who had been banished from his own kingdom by his two elder daughters, was blind because he had had his eyes put out while refusing to confess under torture. He had been cast out of the castle and told ‘to smell his way to Dover’. Being blind, he had stumbled through the chaotic countryside at the mercy of every whim and weather.

Finally, hearing his old royal friend’s voice, he is overjoyed, and asks for proof of his identity, as he cannot see his face. He wants to show his continuing love, loyalty and respect by kissing his hand. King Lear’s response is right in tune with our times:

Gloucester says: ‘O let me kiss that hand’.

King Lear replies: ‘Let me wipe it, first. It smells of Mortality.’

Some context here: the body and the person of the King or Queen is traditionally regarded as sacred. A common person cannot touch a royal person - all the rules of feudal hierarchy decreed it. You could look, but could not touch.

Courtly love rules also required that a true and devoted lover would see his lady as unattainable: she was so high above him, he could never hope to do anything but love her spiritually. He projected his ideals and aspirations onto an image of her, and she guided him through this world like an embodied angel. Ethereal, illuminating and untouchable.

On social media this past week, people are suggesting that instead of hugs, handshakes or even fist bumps on greeting each other, people should bow, as they did in the Eighteenth Century, or put their hands together in the succinct and subtle Namaste.

Our hands are suddenly of great concern - we are being told to wash them several times a day, with conduct books on the correct way to wash our hands being circulated via Instagram and YouTube, in still and animated images. It is because of our hands with their elegant musculature and opposable thumbs that we developed into human beings, able to  make things, from Stone Age tools to planetariums and rocket ships.

With our hands, we touch everything in our world. It is how we instinctively connect with the things and people around us. So now, it’s gloves on, rather than off, but hands on (committed) rather than hands off (disinterested) in our attempt to combat the deadly virus disease, and the low standards of personal hygiene of our fellow citizens.

The corona virus COVID-19 has now been declared a pandemic, which means the focus is now on getting prepared and resourced to deal with it. Do we have enough equipment in the ICU units to protect the health care practitioners who will be treating hundreds of us? Do we have enough soap, hand sanitizer, face masks and cleaning products in our homes?

Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the responsibility of the judgment of Jesus of Nazareth as a criminal. Lady Macbeth, hundreds of years afterwards, thought ‘a little water will cure’ the deed of murdering the reigning King of Scotland. Then in a dramatically symmetrical karmic infliction, she develops compulsive obsessive disorder, washing her hands repeatedly, with no one but her husband understanding why she thinks they are unclean. Isn’t it ironic.

Her doctor says: ‘What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands’.

The lady who looks after her says: ‘It is an accustomed action with her... I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.’

The lady herself, in despair, trying to ‘sweeten’ her hands with every scented soap available, asks: ‘What, will these hands ne’er be clean?’

There it is again, the smell of mortality.

Unfortunately for us, we sensitive plants, we are not abstract creatures, and it is through touch that we convey love and receive signs of affirmation, affection and acceptance. So now that personal contact is being said to be dangerous, we are comprehensively deprived of a source of happiness and our sense of tactile belonging is diminished.

We are being told not to travel, to work from home and conduct conferences, seminars and classes virtually by Skype and Zoom. Technology may enable us to communicate, verbally and visually, but on the personal level I think that the lessening of physical presence and proximity we will now inevitably experience as we self-isolate will create an outpouring of dreams, and romantic fantasies.

We will create avatars and iconic images of them in our imaginations. Those we love will be the very ones we do not want to touch, for fear of contaminating them with our viral mortality.