Everything is breaking
Welcome to the fourth installment of Not Dead Yet, my monthly-ish roundup of compelling writing. I must admit I haven’t been reading as much as I usually do in the last few weeks. Julia and I are working overtime at the store trying to adapt to Covid (and the Covid-related panic buying) as best we can.
It’s an incredibly strange time, being thrust into urgency and finding myself called a “front-line” worker, as life has slowed to a crawl for many of my friends working from home. Every day feels like a week, my physical world has shrunk, and yet my responsibilities have compounded. Everything is cancelled, and everyone is recalibrating their relationship with the world.
Fitsum Areguy hits on some hard truths in his essay for Briarpatch, COVID-19 and the threat of “community policing”. Drawing from his experience as a youth worker in Kitchener, and from an interview with Desmond Cole, he questions the motives of community policing in Waterloo Region.
The model, ostensibly focused on relationship-building, looks an awful lot like surveillance and profiling — especially when police forces are reticent to share information about the data they keep.
In The Frontier Couple Who Chose Death Over Life Apart, Eva Holland hooks you in with a mysterious, even salacious introduction about a couple that chooses the place and time of their own passing.
If you’re looking for CSI-style gruesome details, skip this one. The story spins out into a broader reflection on the right to die in Canada and the USA, and its impact on a small fishing community.
(Eva also has a new book out about the science of fear. You should check it out.)
Our society is being reshaped into forms we had given up imagining, or had been told were not realistic. Basic income and paid sick leave are being rolled out by governments that quashed those ideas mere months ago.
As we begin to imagine a post-Covid relationship with work and the economy, I’ve been thinking about David Graeber‘s 2013 essay, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen.
If you’re newly working from home, how has your relationship with your job changed in this period of social distancing? Does it feel more like bullshit, or less?
I’d love to hear what you thought about these stories. You can reply directly to this email.
The next Not Dead Yet will come in four weeks’ time. Until then, why not forward this email to a friend who’d appreciate it?
Cheers,
Sam