Pandemic diary: April

So here we are, over a year from my first covid diary. Just a couple of days after my previous post on the subject, the government announced we would be going into a sort-of-lockdown for most of March, and a week later, the municipal elections were postponed until June. The government then wanted to introduce draconian restrictions on movement, including a curfew for some of the worst-affected areas, but their proposed measures were struck down as unconstitutional and pulled. Luckily, toward the end of March cases started receding, and suddenly, barely over a week since the curfew failed to pass, we started talking about opening everything up again. It's enough to give you whiplash.

As you can see from the graph of confirmed infections, we've brought cases down to approximately where they were before we started opening up again in January. Restaurants and suchlike are now opening again. I think you see where this may well be going.

What's getting lost is that there was no reason for either the December or March-April spikes to happen at all. The only reason they did was, frankly, short-sightedness and stupidity, and of course greed. People died for it.

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I've mentioned this before, but what I find quite personally hurtful is that I know people who are ostensibly liberal, maintain they support free speech and deliberative democracy - and also believe I shouldn't be writing any of this, because they're on social media sharing messages that say "unless you're a fully accredited academic expert, shut up". I absolutely agree that the vapid opportunism of the right-wing opposition is shameful and stupid, but at the point where even supposedly progressive people are lumping everyone critical of the government with far-right covid deniers, well, I guess authoritarian technocracy doesn't look so bad to you after all, does it?

We transitioned from this directly to the discourse on the postponed elections, which immediately became more of the same. The extreme right tried to spin moving the elections into some kind of communist plot against democracy, which was ridiculous. Quite a lot of people across the political spectrum, however, were very unhappy with how the move was handled, and the apparently total lack of preparation by the responsible state agencies. This then got the government loyalists to declare that these two criticisms are exactly the same: if you think the state hasn't done everything perfectly, you're a far-right extremist. It's really been something.

So yeah, we're certainly learning a lot about our fellow citizens during this pandemic, and so much of it is so much worse than I would have ever expected. I ended up taking a bit of a break from Twitter because of this bullshit, and I feel much better for it. I understand that people are tired and stressed out, because I am too, but some of this behavior has still been absolutely appalling.

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Anyway I don't have much to say; as I predicted, I'm pretty sure I'll be teaching remotely for the rest of the semester, and I really dislike it. Not being able to see or properly interact with people makes teaching incredibly difficult, and at worst reduces it to a filmed monologue. That's not what I do or want to do. However, the way the employment situation for teachers is, it looks like teaching, whether remotely or in-person, isn't going to be my problem for much longer. There are next to no job openings, and when there are, they're inundated with dozens of applicants. I keep applying for everything I can, and have yet to land a single interview. In several cases, there have been 20-50 people applying for a temporary position of one year, only for the school to give the job to the same person who had it the previous year. So it's hard to see the point of applying at all. The logic seems to be the old classic: you can't get a job because you have no experience, therefore you can't get any experience. I have nothing except a couple of lecture courses to look forward to next fall.

The unavoidable logic seems to be that I need to find another profession. Again. What makes this particularly frustrating is that I keep getting excellent feedback on my teaching. Unfortunately, as in academia, so in teaching it doesn't matter one bit whether or not you're good at your job. I would dearly like to find something where it does matter, but I have no real idea what that could be. Quite frankly, this is all incredibly depressing.