❦ I believe Covid is the first disease in recorded history that humans have deliberately chosen to “live with”.

Because that’s an empty slogan, it deliberately disguises two fundamentally different meanings.

We have, of course, had to endure some diseases because they’re hard to control – or have no treatments.

Colds, flu, dengue fever, TB, cancer, malaria, heart disease…

But we’ve constantly worked to control spread of these diseases, and tried to develop treatments and preventions for them.

That’s what “living with” has historically meant.

Enduring something while trying to prevent, control and treat it. But the “living with” slogan for Covid means something fundamentally and historically different.

It means to do nothing.

Just infect, repeatedly.

It’s not a fight against the disease. It’s a fight against public health itself. Funded by the same vested interests who have been assaulting everything with ‘public’ in its name, or with a public focus.

It’s an assault upon the concept of public itself.

And again, no matter how much these vested interests deny it, this is also an open, declared campaign. And has been for over 70 years.

It’s right there: ‘personal responsibility’ to replace anything public.

— “There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.”

(Margaret Thatcher)

Never before has this lunacy extended to disease.

But it does now.

I don’t think enough have registered yet that once you remove all of the infrastructure of society in this way, all that’s left that binds people together are slogans.

We live in a sloganocracy.

“Living with Covid” sits atop an ocean of slogans; we’re neck-deep in them.

Slogans are the only interpersonal social life that is now permitted to exist.

“Stop the Boats.”

Spend time listing them.

It’s eye-opening.

© 2023 Henry Madison. ➲

❂

— “It is what it is.”

— (“Covid is what Covid is.”)

— (“It isn’t what it isn’t.”)

— “Levelling up.”

— “Get Brexit Done.”

— “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

— “Eat out to help out.”

— “Mask if it makes you feel more comfortable.”

— “I’ve moved on.”

— “Live your best life.”

— “Life is for living...”

A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper-sticker logic, or clichéd thinking) is a form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.