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It’s Time For a Jubilee!
We can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel of the awful pandemic which has claimed nearly three million lives. But this is not waking up from a nightmare. Quite the opposite — the pandemic itself should have awoken us to the nightmarish reality we have been sleeping through for too long.
In an essay written just before his untimely death in 2020, David Graeber wrote:
“[I]n reality, the crisis we just experienced was waking from a dream, a confrontation with the actual reality of human life, which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams.”
