Shock Waves III

Because ultimately, when one then says that the government is not responsible and people have to be on their own, whether or not they have the capacity to do so or not, it means that ultimately those who are the most "fit" will be able to survive, those with the most money, the resources and so forth, as opposed to ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to survive, to be cared for. Again, I'm always moved and impressed and content by the love and the care that people can provide within a community structure. And people should continue to do that — but it's not enough, and hopefully people can come together collectively to demand that the government should also be providing that care work. [...]

[...] If I were writing another book and I wanted to expand what plague and epidemics mean, then I would actually think about non-infectious diseases as well. And I alluded to this in one of my previous answers by pointing to cancer. But of course, there are other epidemics that we are living with, particularly the opioid epidemic, which is very much an epidemic that is perpetuated by poverty, that is tied to desperation, that is tied to the ways in which communities have been devastated in a post-industrial context of jobs being gone and so forth, and that that epidemic is something that people are living with, and I would say, is something that various communities, particularly in the Appalachians and Midwest, are still struggling with.

In the book, when I talk about the prison question, it's how chronic diseases, early aging, specifically, tuberculosis, airborne diseases, are very much more likely to be present in a prison system than for a non-incarcerated population. Beyond that, if we think about this current moment in the United States, where there's an open war on migrants. Migrants who, in some cases are speaking about Palestine, students, what I would consider to be babies. These are young, idealistic, in some cases teenagers, and if anything, we should be commending them for being brave, and yet they're being hunted down by the U.S. government, or, most recently, people being taken by the U.S. government, accused of being part of gangs without any type of due process, suddenly deported to El Salvador. 

What implications does that have, not just for people's mental and physical state, but just for others who might also be fearing, "will I be next?" I think that ultimately, the question around deportations, with the question around anti-immigrant policies, is really a chaotic process that is also tearing apart, in some cases, the members of families that have multinational citizenship and/or resident statuses. And so in a sense, it's not purely about infectious diseases and epidemics per se, but rather the kind of the fear that it stokes within communities.

I think one thing that people have been writing about, and I'm also doing some research on right now, is how U.S. foreign policy is going to, especially with the cuts to USAID, impact the spread of epidemics currently in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. What various countries of the African continent are doing, luckily, is they had realized back in 2014 with the Ebola crisis that they could not rely on the U.S., and so the formation of the African CDC since then has meant that there's far more coordination between African nations. I actually attended an online press conference that they had last week, because they do regular press conferences just to answer questions posed to the African CDC in a way that I'm like, "Oh, wow. This is great. Like, this is what should be done." 

But the reason I point this out is just to say that in the short term, and actually even medium term, it costs lives for us not to continue to fund the USAID, especially with specific programs around antiretroviral therapy. And at the same time, people are making do, particularly on the African continent, because they had already had a little taste of bigotry and exclusions more than a decade before. 

Interview with Edna Bonhomme - More than a plague: How colonialism, class and incarceration feed disease outbreaks

for Salon by Carlyn Zwarenstein

U.S. Vs Trump's Administration | Reuters

Houve sempre um gato 

que recolhes pela piedade do destino 

e de quem cuidas e conquistas 

e tremes e és conquistado 

E que fica, fica 

a brincar com palhas e folhas e rolos 

do mesmo fio com que desfias as horas 

de velo e desvelo 

Há sempre um gato 

que fará melhor do que os outros 

e acalma, acalanta, balanceia,

e fita e desfita  

Espéra-lo pela noite quando sai

na descarada, escancarada, iluminada rua 

de desespero, cardíaco, sublimante,

fulminante

E chovem copiosamente 

mares dos olhos.

Haverá sempre um gato

a quem deixarás a porta aberta 

para que possa entrar e invadir 

o coração das nossas vidas 

tão cheias de sorrisos 

e pelos nas camisas 

camisolas quentes, acobreadas, 

refletindo-nos nos olhos felídeos

e mortais.

Deixar sempre a vida inacabada 

e não querer voltar já mais.

Dos gatos

23 de julho - Para ti, meu Zé