I’m really okay with all this doom: some thoughts on toilet paper and revolution
I’m now going attempt to answer the question burning in everyone’s minds: the reason the shelves at Costco are bare of toilet paper.
Freud wasn’t right about a lot of things, but in this instance, he might be. He said the asshole is the symbol of death and we live in fear of it. Fear of its dirtiness. Fear of the End. If this weren’t such a universal, why would the stuff you clean your ass with be the first thing you reach for in a crisis?
The pundits and late-night comedians and politicians keep saying (from their comfy homes) ‘stop hoarding,’ and ‘don’t be so selfish’ without a hint of conscious irony. Are they also in denial, despite having flogged us daily with reminders about our impending demise?
The only reason they say this is that they have hogged more than their fair share of the TP already, the expensive soft kind, and they too thought of that first, because without something to wipe our butts, we’re goddamn animals.
Really what we are acting out here is terror of scarcity. Dr. Laura Kerr, author and trauma psychotherapist proposes that the constant injury of fearing scarcity is not a random byproduct of capitalism, but the mechanism that makes it go. In a blog post that has since been taken down, she spoke eloquently about how this low-level trauma keeps us in a state of disassociation. It keeps us pliable, and even the soothing tools, entertainment, spa treatments, sports, are simply there to mitigate the disorganizing force of scarcity.
The word “existential” is being thrown around generally as a synonym for doom, but that philosophy's chief tenet is so resonant: there is no predictable formula governing the universe. We humans like order, but that’s an internal function we project out onto the world to manage unpredictability. Chaos is the truth under all of it. Or as Yeats would say, “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
When the establishment tells us to stay home and not do the one thing that we’ve all been relentlessly primed for our whole lives (make money, spend money) it rings the deepest, darkest survival alarm we have. When the government starts talking about sending us money, we know we’re fucked.
Ernest Becker, psychologist and philosopher, said in his book Denial of Death that people experience the concept of death in a way that other species don’t. Everything has a will to live and a natural instinct to avoid danger, sure, but death simmers under the surface of our consciousness and makes us do counterintuitive things.
Humans have been wheeling toward the cliff like a mudder in late March with no brakes — for decades. Those of us who are conscious of the climate crisis suppress it mentally so we can get through the day, and those of us denying it still act out our collective deathwish.
Put another way, we all go through life willingly and actively denying death because if we didn’t, it would be chaos in the streets. But we’ve all got that bit of darkness in us. And it bursts forth in unexpected ways like at Costo during a pandemic.
In this frightening moment while we face death, we will achieve clarity and rethink many of our assumptions. As things fall apart, we will see how badly many of them worked in the first place. In the U.S., so many people have no hope of survival and most work way too hard, their feet dangling over the chasm of poverty. Then there is a tiny group of people who literally sit on their asses and take selfies and accrue interest. And we all talk about how awful it is, but we all had the power to stop it this entire time.
It all felt so intractable until now, didn’t it? Like nothing would ever change. Well, this virus is like the honey badger: it doesn’t give a fuck.
Back in the 60s, R. Buckminster Fuller said that it was already technologically within our means to feed everyone, clothe everyone, house everyone on the entire planet, and we’d all only have to do a handful of work hours a week if we manage our collective resources and distribute that work effectively. He imagined we would become an attuned species, and that most of our time would be spent in the pursuit of beauty and knowledge of the natural world.
Instead, the globalized, slave labor economy will go into a deep freeze. We are going to miss all those golden decades of cheap Chinese goods. We’ve all sneered at the outsourcing and simultaneously praised the deal we got on those silicone spatulas at Target. But not anymore!
Didn’t a tiny part of you long for this? A moment where the whole system came to a screeching, screaming halt? A moment where a dollar is just a piece of paper again.? A moment where your child took back the power your boss had over you? A moment where all the bullshit we’ve been pretending was important suddenly became bullshit again?
A moment of abject annihilation so pure, so crisp, that only Mother Nature could pull it off.
Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want anyone to fall ill or die. I lament the end of democracy. It was a great idea invented by indigenous women reframed to suit white slaveholders, but nonetheless, the Constitution had some kickass ideas in it.
I’m following the experts; what they said weeks ago is turning out to be true today and will likely be true in the coming months: millions of people will die, and we will still be reeling 18 months from now, even if we play this totally right, which we won’t.
We still don’t do right by each other as a species. The stimulus that once again saves billionaires while the rest of us ration food and default on our mortgages, is so predictable, and yet mind-blowingly hateful at the same time. They are going to pull a W and siphon more off the top like in the mortgage catastrophe and Nancy and Chuck just handed them the pen (even though they were not allowed in the room). And if we think that Biden can pull off an Obama, we are being just as quixotic as the current occupant as he plans his “big beautiful Easter” like it’s the grand opening of a used car lot.
But what if this is the last time we let them stick their hands in the goody bag?
Yesterday, the UN chief called for a worldwide ceasefire due to the coronavirus outbreak. Some countries have already complied. Could that have happened at any time?
In the last few days, Amazon workers in four countries and across the U.S. walked out of the fulfillment centers for unsafe labor conditions. This puts a little kink in Jeff Bezos’ plan to become the world’s first trillionaire.
The president’s lies are so damaging that even corporate media is choosing not to air his press conferences. What if the entire WH press corps went on strike?
There’s no traffic at rush hour. All those meetings just became emails. The skies are clear. People are taking up jogging — with face masks.
My neighbors call or knock every few days. We yell across the street to see if anyone needs anything. In my house, we’ve been waking up at 8 am and my daughter helps make breakfast and does her own dishes. She’s reading recipes and building a birdhouse.
It took this, people getting sick and needlessly dying, for us to really see ourselves. Crony capitalism gave us a failed healthcare system and an anti-science nincompoop in the White House.
Is this the moment we take back our power?
I think about WWII, when the men went off to fight the good fight, and the women moved into the factories. An army of Rosies suddenly found that they could do the job just as well as the menfolk. It was a revelation, but when the war was over, American companies conducted a massive campaign to push women back into the home. See Susan Faludi’s Backlash.
The supply chain is already slumping. Domestic companies are retooling to provide critical equipment. The farmers are still out there in the fields hard at work. The restaurants are partnering with government agencies and making meal kits to be delivered to those with elevated risk.
Meanwhile, artists are pressing record and performing for millions for free. Scientists and medical professionals all over the world are sharing more information and research than ever in the history of humanity.
We’re doing this for each other. We are connecting as we never have before.
In the wake of this disaster, can we tap the human potential that we have left to rot on the vine for generations? We can dismantle failed systems and rebuild them brick by brick to best supply every person with basic quality of life. There was never a better time to consider radical “how are we going to pay for it” plans like the Green New Deal.
Nature is the great equalizer. Celebrities and politicians are mortal. Humans are great at learning individually but terrible at learning collectively. It takes chaos on a grand scale to alter our consciousness.
We will also defy our own expectations of human capability. We will do the unthinkable, both sublime and horrible. The question then becomes, how will this change our responsibility toward each other? As we lucky ones spend the next few months at home fighting boredom and maintaining sanity, will we also rethink the heavy-duty siloing (social, spiritual, economic, relational) that comes with global capitalism? I hope so.
I learned from writer Jorge Juan Rodríguez V today that the etymology of the word apocalypse derives from the Greek meaning, uncovering or revealing.
Maybe this is the moment where we wake up from the toxic nightmare of separateness. The moment where Mother Nature reminds us that we only really have one job: to love and take care of each other and the planet we live on.
