Albertans cannot see Covid-19
Alberta, a Canadian Province known for its oil & gas production, has not been insulated from the Coronavirus pandemic. As most of the Province’s fields of pumpjacks bob and nod extracting crude resources from below the Earth’s surface, Provincial authorities have declared a second state of public health emergency in Alberta.
The Provincial health care system’s burden, like in other Canadian and American jurisdictions, results from high risk social gatherings that transmit the infectious Coronavirus. It seems that Albertans cannot work to flatten the spread of the virus because they cannot resist socialization. They cannot see the implications of their actions.
Albertan deaths from Covid-19 complications have been low compared to other jurisdictions. The reports of a “tragic milestone” and the increasing Covid-19 hospitalization caseload seem like a whisper against the public yell for pipelines and a renewed oil & gas economy in Alberta.
Oil & gas activity is a visible part of Alberta’s landscape. Reservoirs, pumpjacks, gas plants, and compressor stations are economic indicators throughout the Province and are commonly situated beside or within farmers’ fields. However, some of Alberta’s industrial engines are not in motion, they are not pumping. This is a perceptible fact. A highway traveler can simply see when their oil & gas economy has been turned off, because those pumpjacks are no longer observed to be bobbing and nodding.
Coronavirus has not visibly marked Alberta like the weakening oil & gas economy has. Though the virus has spread throughout Alberta like the Province’s buried oil & gas pipelines, there are no visible physical structures to attest to the virus’s significance to public health.
The public can see Covid-19 in terms of mask use, hand sanitizer stations, and paper notices on storefronts to remind patrons to physically distance. But the Alberta public, until recently, had no ability to see Covid-19 in the flesh. Because hospitals have strict visitation protocols and long-term care centers have transformed into passive prisons, Covid-19 has been removed from the public’s view. The virus is not a pumpjack in the field nor it is a permanent refinement facility. The Coronavirus is invisible and health protocol has hidden anything physical to see and view. The public is blind to the Covid-19 infectious disease.
Most people, myself included, have two degrees of separation from a recovered or current Covid-19 patient: you know someone who knows someone who has been infected. Two degrees of separation is not enough to personally see the dangers of infection and the harms to public health. For many of us in Alberta, Coronavirus has not entered our immediate perceptions and remains out of view like a buried pipeline.
Slavoj Žižek in Examined Life (2008) suggests an ideological recalibration for our perceptions of human waste. Žižek is Slovenian Philosopher and is known as the Elvis of cultural theory; he is also a Marxist and I personally do not agree with is economic views. Žižek does, moreover, indicate how waste is seen and then quickly unseen. And the unseeing of waste is the cause of ideology or rather the incorrect thinking about ecology and nature.
“Part of our daily perception of reality is that [waste] disappears from our world. When you go to the toilet, shit disappears. You flush it. Of course rationally you know it’s there in canalization and so on, but at a certain level of your most elementary experience, it disappears from your world. But the problem is that trash doesn’t disappear” — Slavoj Žižek.
For Žižek the flushing of shit is perceived as the shit disappearing and it then leaves our immediate thoughts and concerns. We don’t give shit a second thought once the toilet flushes. However, if the shit were to reappear such as the case with a blocked drain or a damaged pipe, our immediate thoughts and concerns would turn to address the arising health implications caused by the proximity of human waste. The Coronavirus pandemic, in this sense, should be viewed and considered as a metaphorical clogged toilet, a situation requiring immediacy.
The rising Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths, moreover, are not in the public’s full perception, because the metaphorical clogged toilet has not occurred in their own homes, yet. Žižek uses the example of human defecation to illuminate his point on incorrect thinking about ecology and nature, and this insight may be repurposed to illuminate the public’s incorrect thoughts and their lack of perception of the Coronavirus’s implications to health. A repurposed insight may usher into full view personal accountability and the broader public health consequences of the spread of Covid-19.
Albertans, like other populations, need to open their eyes to the shit that has surfaced in front of them. The Coronavirus is not something that may be flushed away or orphaned like an oil & gas well. The pandemic is a situation that requires open eyes.
