This line from Lucy Easthope’s new book (pg 4) reminds me of the paper I never finished about Covid-19 as a reflexive imperative in Margaret Archer’s sense i.e. an event to which everyone has no choice but to respond, even if those responses might differ in dramatic ways:
The long, difficult years of the coronavirus pandemic and the global lockdown showed that disasters don’t just happen to other people. Every one of us experienced the pandemic differently and with different types of loss. But all of our lives were bent out of their normal shapes by something over which we had no control.
In this sense I think we need to see it as the immediate context for pretty much anything micro-social* we examine in our present circumstances. There’s a deeper sense of disruption she describes on pg 36 which was less evenly distributed through the population:
Most people will experience unwanted change or loss at some point int heir lives. Sometimes it will feel very surmountable, but at other times it will divide our lives into the time before and the time after. This can be true of events, but it can also be true of feelings and relationships. You can forget that help and allegiance and ways to get through are out there, that there is light in the dark.
*Macro-socially too, but in a different way.
Mark Carrigan 