One of the things which Covid-19 seems to have exposed is the extent to which people feel such a sense of entitlement to travel
Few of us saw this pandemic coming. I, in my ignorance, believed that infectious diseases were a thing of the past. I thought that modern medicine had largely defeated the killer infections of earlier centuries, through mass vaccination programmes.
The announcement of national lockdown in the UK, to stay at home for the sake of safety, our own and others’, was difficult to take in. It was like a domino effect approaching – China, South Korea, Italy, Spain, then us. No going to work, no school or college, no meeting friends or family, no leisure pursuits outside the home, no travelling. Our taken for granted freedoms were being limited and it was shocking.
But of course, we also understood that the government, whatever one thinks of them, was seeking to protect us from a deadly presence which was stealing through our country, killing at random. Not since the last war on these shores was the whole population agreeable to taking orders from central government on the detail of how we must behave to stay alive and defend our country.
The mass deaths that followed and the tragic nature of the ensuing bereavements are matched only by the rising rates of mental, social and financial problems amongst the whole population. We shall not know what are the long-term consequences of this pandemic, for either individuals or the world, until much more time has elapsed.
And while twenty-one weeks on from the start of lockdown, the infection rates have reduced dramatically, we are not yet free from danger. As we gradually begin to restore some of our former ways of living, Covid-19, our invisible foe, reminds us that it is still here and just as deadly. The more we ‘open up’, the more we risk the virus spreading again.
Of course, achieving compliance in the population hasn’t been a smooth process. Early on some people just didn’t understand ‘stay at home’, believing that if they drove to a remote place to exercise the dogs, there was no harm in it. Some continued to meet up with friends and family, in plain defiance of the rules. Others in high office believed the law didn’t apply to them, making journeys without apparent justification – and escaped punishment which did little to promote a sense that we were all in it together.
But it wasn’t long before a general understanding and acceptance of the need to pull together was replaced by a widespread sense of grievance about being confined. And so the protests grew louder. ‘How much longer do we have to make these sacrifices? We just want to get on with our lives. We deserve a holiday after all we’ve been through!’
So what does getting on with our lives mean? Sadly, for many of us it appears to mean returning to a state of unthinking hedonism. Despite the continuing risks, people demanded the right to go to the pub, to meet up with their mates, to go to the beach and to holiday abroad. And the government, like others across the world, preoccupied by lasting damage to the economy, was keen to oblige. So the pubs have reopened, people are being offered subsidised meals to ‘eat out to help out’ and lobbying from the airlines and tourist industry resulted in the restoration of flights to holiday destinations in the sun.
But how is it that we have come to feel so entitled? Amongst other things, we feel entitled to travel wherever we want, when we want no matter what the consequences, the most immediately obvious of which is spreading the virus. How remarkable that despite vast numbers of people in the world suffering without enough to eat or no shelter, we in the affluent West seem to find it unthinkable to go without a holiday abroad even for one summer – and in the face of a deathly pandemic.
Just for a little while, during the national lockdown, the air was cleaner and many species of flora and fauna began to recover from the onslaught of pollution. People commented on how they heard birdsong for the first time in their urban neighbourhoods and many were surprised by a sense of wellbeing which accompanied life with less noise and more stillness. But these delightful discoveries were not precious enough. Indeed, it’s not enough to hear irrefutable evidence of the catastrophic damage we are doing to the planet on which we all depend by, amongst other things, emissions from air travel and motorised vehicles. Instead, we put our energies into demanding the restoration of our ‘right’ to move around freely.
It is clear that there are no straightforward solutions to the way the world is currently organised, based on an assumption of exponential growth. If, for example, the tourism trade across the world declines, many people lose their jobs and livelihoods. And yet tourism is an unsustainable industry. Travel is a luxury and cannot continue to be built into society as a given. We must face up to the consequences of this sense of entitlement to unlimited travel because one day soon there may be no habitable planet to travel around.
Photograph by Adrian Pingstone – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2961280
Inside and Outside 