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Shoppers in Edinburgh, some wearing masks, others not
We’re being encouraged to get back in the shops, but we need messages we can all get behind. Photograph: Lesley Martin/AFP/Getty Images
We’re being encouraged to get back in the shops, but we need messages we can all get behind. Photograph: Lesley Martin/AFP/Getty Images

Can we call a truce in the culture wars? We've never needed each other more

This article is more than 3 years old
Zoe Williams

What awaits us post-pandemic feels terrifying - from the climate crisis to a bad-deal Brexit. In an era of huge division, it’s time to recognise how much we have in common

I used to listen to true-crime podcasts, where all the ads are for surveillance systems and DNA tests for your pet. I was hooked on those, bingeing on them, fixating upon likely culprits, like a lady Cracker.

But it had to stop: there was something hubristic about it, as though, on some sub-verbal level, I thought I was helping. I used to dream about people being found in barrels, skin cells trapped under the extra-long fingernails of a murderer. It’s better for my character, I decided, to listen instead to people who sound a bit like me talk about the unseen consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But the ads are driving me crazy. So emollient, so comforting. I can just about bear them when I can’t hear the words, when there is a motorbike going past or I have been distracted by a conversation in my head. Then it is all quasi-hypnotic female voices, accepting and maternal. Naturally, originally I assumed they were for incontinence pads, and thought: “Huh, that’s rude – just because I’m into the intricacies of the 90s and how its narratives played out doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with my pelvic floor.”

But inevitably, sometimes you hear the words. It could be your building society crooning: “Maybe you want to stay in. Maybe you want to go out. Maybe you want to cocoon. Maybe you want to escape. What matters most is that you’re wherever you feel comfortable.” Or it could be some agency of government, reassuring you about garden centres and non-essential shopping, but always concluding that what matters, people – what’s really important, aural chums – is that you’re wherever you feel comfortable.

“Comfort” is the buzz concept of the corona era: “I don’t feel comfortable going to a restaurant”; “I don’t feel comfortable wearing a mask”; “All these people are making me really uncomfortable”. It used to be an insult, to be accused of studying your own comfort. But that is not really what the word means in this context – it is not velvet cushions and clement temperatures; it is therapy-washed language for evangelising your own boundaries, which you have because you are so responsible, and you make such great choices. Or that is what I think when I hear these ads, anyway.

It is terrifically unfortunate that we were already in a culture war before the pandemic struck. Whether you feel comfortable going to the pub or not doesn’t really say anything about your politics. Covering or not covering your mouth and nose when you go to Co-op is not a critical identity-builder. Yet all these random debates have been sucked into the existing storm, the way a tornado can pick up a cow or a truck.

If we step back from the enforced dichotomies of the age, we all have a lot in common. I do want to go to the pub. I do want to see a load of people, and also hug them. But I am also relying on the back-to-normal refuseniks, because I don’t want to get to the next phase. I want deaths from Covid to cease, but I do not want post-Covid to commence, because it’s going to be carnage.

I sit opposite my Mr, both of our faces knotted with anxiety, and ask what he is worrying about, and it’s a war with China. He asks what I am worrying about, and it’s all the specialist cheesemakers going bust, and the beautiful cheeses that will be lost for ever. Or he is worrying about the children, and whether or not they will ever rediscover their maths ethic. And I am worrying about 45C temperatures in the Arctic Circle, also the children. Or he is worrying about mass unemployment, and I am worrying about a bad-deal Brexit. Or sometimes we are both worrying about the same thing. But the point is, all of these things are hanging over us. Some of them are waiting for the end of the corona crisis in order to fully unleash; others are carrying gaily on through it, it’s just that we are not focusing on them.

There is a gruesome luxury in remaining suspended by the disease: you have one problem, and it has the simplest possible answer – stay at home. All that matters is that you are comfortable. The minute you come out of that comfort zone, you have a thousand problems, and their answers are not simple at all.

At the start, our mutual need was so strong that it was almost its own consolation, the intensity of that gratitude, to every delivery guy who had to keep going out, to every mother of tiny nutjob toddlers who had to keep staying in. Then we all got ratty with each other, and started sunbathe-policing and hating people with gardens. But now we need each other again; everyone who wants to restart the world yesterday needs everyone who wants to restart it tomorrow. Too fast is too terrifying, but never is not an option. Maybe we could call some kind of truce.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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