Over the last few weeks I’ve had a recurring image come into my mind, of walking off the battlefield, and inspecting my wounds. Pulling an arrow from my side, and going to a field hospital to be bandaged and healed. The last few years have been a spiritual war, an information war, and those who step onto the battlefield can end up as casualties.
The weapons are not arrows or gunshots, but words, on an informational level, on a spiritual level, something else entirely. We have all in effect been drawn onto the battlefield in one way or another, and our injuries, are not physical injuries but the emotional wounds, of hurt, loss, and pain.
Is it over? Is it time to look at the wreckage and destruction of the past two years? To peer out at what remains of our old reality, after the ‘new normal’ superimposed itself on everything we knew, and felt safe with? That old life, was all we knew. It was the reality in which we worked and spent time with friends and family and raised children, and struggled and had hopes and dreams. And then it was about struggle, and more struggle, and more struggle, as the rich got richer. And we fell into the war, because we didn’t think that was right.
Is it over? I read an article yesterday in Off Guardian that said it was, that country after country are removing restrictions. Then I had a few hours in town, drinking on the streets with friends like a teenager, chilled by the February air, and then feeling desperate to find a toilet. On the way home I watched a video of teargas flooding a restaurant in France.
How can this be over?
But yet, still I have this image, that I am walking away from the battlefield. Maybe it’s me, that’s done with the fight.
The UK government says it’s over, have removed all restrictions, and meanwhile they are amending human rights laws, and creating new list of online ‘communications offences’ that people can be prosecuted for including, ‘deliberately sharing dangerous disinformation about hoax Covid-19 treatments.’
If it’s over, then it’s over with a sense of unease, rumbling beneath the surface, like a dormant volcano that could erupt at any moment.
Can you imagine a reality in which people have a difference of opinion about how we care for the sick go to prison? Doctors and medical professionals could be carted off for saying, ‘’lets treat people early.’’ Do we trust the legal system to adequately define what is information and disinformation in a heavily profit-biased reality?
A year ago, I found myself walking in the hills outside Florence and coming to an old abandoned tiny house, that had been used as a place of refuge for soldiers, when they were fighting the war against fascism. I’m not sure I’m up for more of a fight with the weaponry of advanced laws from a system that continues to fight for control of the human body, mind and soul.
If you want me you’ll find me in that refuge, tending to my own wounds, and like a wounded healer, doing what I can to support my fellow survivors.
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