Pandemic "theater" and mutual care

When I try to realize a song, I watch a lot of different videos of it. Mildly obsessed with the Sephardic repertoire, I am watching many different videos of the culinary song Siete modos de guisar las berenjenas (“Seven ways to cook an eggplant") with such delightful lyrics as “The second one to make it (the eggplant)/ is the wife of the Shamma she hollows it and fills it with herbs, and lots of rice they call this meal: a dish of dolma.”

The Sephardic diaspora has a remarkably rich musical repertoire, as well as a culinary richness (they gave the Brits allegedly fish and chips, I am not sure if this is true though!) and in this song these two features of their enduring resilience come together.

Watching all these videos, I inevitably stumble upon pandemic-era performances, like this beautiful and fun one from early 2021. I think (and the WHO says) the pandemic is not over, but I mean with “pandemic-era” the time when visible mitigations at a broad scale were in place and when we commonly recognized the threat covid-19 poses. We acknowledged the significant psychological stress it had on us. It is bizarre watching videos like this, they're only a few years old, but it looks like we are in a very different time.

Now a lot of the mitigations in this video, which was shot in March 2021, plainly do not work (as we now know). The plexiglas dividers between the singers, for example. The masks that the instrumentalists wear are not of high enough quality to reliably prevent infection and spread. Minimizers at the time and later, as pressure increased to abandon any pandemic safety measures, called this disparagingly “hygiene theater.”

In this way, our imperfect modes of caring for ourselves and others were reduced to something fake and insincere. But I am less willing to call it theater, because I know the desire to care for our common good was real, and people acted on the knowledge they had. There was genuinely a collective moment where we tried to help each other. For example, the vaccine rollout in Missouri prioritized homeless people, the prison population, and those in risky settings such as healthcare and teachers, and only later (to the chagrin of liberals particularly, the general population). It seems almost incredible to think now that this happened in a red state like Missouri, but it did.

We're now 2024. Different phase of the pandemic and all that. Repeat infection seems to lead to record levels of children not attending school, teachers being ill, and an overall more ill workforce, plus people are still dying of covid. It's still the top infectious disease killer, ahead of tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS. We don't in my view need to prove or argue how covid is similar to AIDs or tuberculosis (all comparisons with fraught political framings), it is bad enough in its own right. Yet, we've now decided to focus on how bad lockdowns were and other mitigations (all mitigations squashed under the banner of “lockdowns”) and any continuing ill effects of this mass disabling event are now often blamed on vaccines or on lingering effects of lockdowns.

But what we forget is that we did, for a brief moment, have this moment of mutual care and the common good of us as a society. We recognized the importance of essential workers and our gaze was briefly turned towards prisoners who died in large numbers from bad living conditions plus covid, as well as elderly in care homes, whose dire circumstances were briefly put into full view.

So watching videos like this eggplant song, I feel saddened but at the same time heartened that we really are capable of mutual care. The video is a testimony that it is possible. Look at the sheer joy in these musicians. Minimizers try to present a revisionist picture where we all sat at home for two years and lacked all joy and community, but videos like these show that this was not the case.

A different mode of dealing with the ongoing pandemic is even now still possible, we now have more knowledge than these musicians in 2021 on how to organize a safe musical event that does not turn into a superspreader event. We succeeded in organizing and adapting ourselves and letting the common good prevail, we can do it again.