Common Decency

Coronavirus outbreak
How do we face coronavirus? Common decency is our only hope
Suzanne Moore

Whether you’re a catastrophist or a conspiracy theorist, everyone has their own way of coping with the pandemic. But what we really need is solidarity and honesty

Let us have our own individual responses and anxieties, because this is how we adapt to the new normal. I don’t yet know what this is any more than you do. Living with uncertainty is hard, but uncertainty has been the emotional pandemic of recent years anyway.

Those who know anything for sure right now are precisely those that I trust the least. I reread The Plague last week, in between necking paracetamol and arguing on Twitter. My God, Camus is great.

“There’s no question of heroism in all this,” he writes. “It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is – common decency.”

Will common decency survive the virus? Will we find it within ourselves? I don’t know, but that seems to me the only vaccine we have.