EWhat if the exceptional, if the abnormal became, over the days, the norm? The world writes that indifference is settling in France despite the increase in the number of victims. If the 8 pm “News” more or less regularly recall the figures abroad (Brazil, United States, Great Britain), they display an astonishing discretion on national data. Modesty ? Willingness not to undermine the morale of the already low population? Instructions from their management? Recommendations from government authorities frightened by their inability to curb the deadly advance of the virus?
To think so would bring water to the mill of the skeptics and other conspirators who claim as always that“We are hiding things”. The truth is perhaps much simpler, much more trivial, much more human. And if this indifference did not translate, quite simply, the fact that the virus settles in our lives like the deaths of cancer, the deaths due to cardiovascular diseases, the victims of road violence, if not not that of the world in which we live?
Diseases, attacks, famines are part of the daily misfortunes of the planet relayed by the media and amplified, distorted, diverted by this plague of the beginning of the century, the supposedly social networks. As long as we lift our noses from the handlebars of our hectic rhythms, misery becomes part of the decor of our lives. We live with it, to use Emmanuel Macron’s phrase. The price to pay for our lifestyles. The price of progress in a way. “Progress” which does not necessarily pull upwards, towards a safer, healthier, more serene life. It’s a safe bet that our weariness forces us to close our eyes, to cover our ears and to divert our capacities for analysis and reactions.
To live with. This is probably the subliminal message sent back to us by the authors of acts of disobedience, of anger, these gatherings of opponents of confinement and health measures which, like the Covid, also know … their variants. Political insubordination? Rebellion in the name of attacks on freedoms? Pure selfishness? Unconsciousness which means that accidents are always for others? Finally, are we not witnessing the insidious trivialization of a situation which is nevertheless tragic? Every evening, without really saying it, we have been told, for thirteen months, the equivalent of a plane crash, a crash that kills 300! Every evening. To live with ? Yes it’s possible.
If road mortality, inadmissible in the 1970s led the public authorities (under Jacques Chirac) to take measures (2,550 deaths in 2020 against nearly 17,000 in 1972), cancers (160,000 deaths per year, 430 per year). day in France) or cardiovascular diseases (140,000 annual deaths, nearly 400 per day) have not diminished although they have a direct impact on us. And who is offended today? Who has the disturbed sleep of it except the sick themselves?
In a normal year, France records between 1,500 and 1,900 daily deaths. Without this disturbing us unduly and causing us to seriously question ourselves on the long-term way of leading and modifying our lives. No deep questioning (raised last spring, the crazy hopes of a world afterwards to the world before seem to have sunk into oblivion). To the 1,500 to 1,900 deaths, the Covid adds between 200 and 300 every twenty-four hours. We have gone, on average, to 2,000 daily deaths. The virus is 12% more deaths between each sunrise.
Would it be enough for the pressure on the media to fall, for the newspapers to no longer make their headlines, followed by multitudes of reports always almost identical elsewhere (especially verifiable in the evening within 8 p.m.), that another news item in the serious consequences (war, climate disaster, etc.) arise? It is a safe bet that the slaughter of the current pandemic will fall (it) in the norm, just like other diseases, the price of “progress”. The slide into oblivion of an evil come from Asia.
But perhaps this passivity finds its foundations in the acceleration (relative in France) of the vaccination: since the help arrives, that the victory is announced but often postponed (for the summer? For the autumn? For Christmas? ), let’s live without delay, at the cost of some risks! Hoping for saving immunity. And the next pandemic or another variant that will advance … masked?
Alain Lucas, Fontenay-sous-Bois (Val-de-Marne)