Little did I know, then, that within months those same roads, even the skies above them, would be emptied by the pandemic. I’d said how delightful it was to roam roads suddenly free of traffic. While I was reviewing Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Talking About Trees during the last London Film Festival, the West End was locked down by Extinction Rebellion protests. I’m f***d off by the cars and planes that are depressingly thick on the ground and in the air again, and with the idea that, for all the babble about building back better, people seem content to return to ‘business as usual’. Yesterday, I saw a car sticker that read: ‘Trust me, I’m even more f****d off than you are’. I’m sure I wasn’t alone, during the lonely nocturnal lows of lockdown, in feeling my mind unravel due to information overload, my spirits flag in the face of mounting daily death tolls, and my anger rise as the raw wounds of ancient injustices were reopened. To say that there’s been a lot to process lately is to underestimate the spectacular scale of these upheavals. Those with mental health problems, too, will have suffered untold distress during the imposed isolation of lockdown. Then there are such changes to policing and society as may be made in response to the anti-racist protests and the changes to many women’s lives resulting from domestic violence. The economic impact of the pandemic has lead to what analysts are already calling ‘de-globalisation’. The office, the High Street and the cash economy may be gone for good. The dizzying and disorientating events of recent months have accelerated changes in the way we live and work that would otherwise have taken decades to materialise. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty that reads, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses who yearn to breath free’ now rings increasingly hollow for those everywhere declaring, after Franz Fanon, ‘I can’t breathe’. Those protests and the pandemic threw the festering iniquities of neo-liberalism and the ancient injustice of systemic racism into sharp relief. Entire countries and their economies had already been shut down before we viewed footage of Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis and watched as anti-racist protests rolled across the world. Until recently, few of us had heard of Wuhan, a city larger than London fewer still could’ve described the flag of Mississippi, from which the confederate flag will soon be removed and almost nobody had heard of George Floyd. Recent events on the banks of the Yangtze River and the Mighty Mississippi seemed to stretch time as well credulity. Our times have become so interesting, indeed, that it now seems incredible only five months have passed since Covid-19 first announced itself. Seldom can the Chinese proverb ‘You will be cursed to live in interesting times’ have felt more apposite. Tom Hayden, Rebellion and Repression, 1969 a system which relies more and more on the use of force, on the use of police to maintain itself rather than on consent or persuasion or the traditional techniques of democracy." " Violence in this country stems from a system which is sick, which is racist, which apparently has a boundless ambition to police the world. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941 Right through our national life we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion that a dim-witted public schoolboy is better fitted for command than an intelligent mechanic." " What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old. Priestley’s Postcripts and Peter Whitehead’s The Fall. Jerry Whyte reflects on the pandemic, policing and racism in the UK and US with reference to two pivotal years, 19, and with the unlikely assistance of J.B.
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