You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school. Most of the young…
You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school.
Most of the young can’t even afford a home, and never will.
‘Home’ as an idea is under assault. By ‘the economy’.
The economy is a verb, not a noun. /1 https://t.co/KSAEoxifGX
The economy is an activity of dispossession, and displacement. To allow the accumulation, of people and things.
It’s the deliberate destruction not just of actual homes, both for humans and other living things, but of the concept of home. /2
I’ve Tweeted many times about how we replaced the idea of home, with the idea of an address.
A geographical reference point, on a map. Maps have always been the great tools of economic empire. We now live inside them. /3
Our obsessive travel culture is this same living inside. We accumulate places on our ‘bucket lists’, the way earlier generations collected stamps.
Collection itself is the same disruptive and accumulative culture. It’s why it’s such an obsessive hobby, for many. /4
Our two greatest current emergencies, climate change and Covid, are the spawn of this underlaying mechanism.
Of displacement and accumulation. Fossil fuels power it, creating climate change. Displacement of living things created Covid and now spreads it without pause. /5
Aliens observing us would surely ask, where is everybody going? Why are we always going somewhere, and not just staying put?
For work or leisure. Mobility is our culture. But with no actual purpose. It’s a purpose in itself. /6
Millions ‘commute’ every day, and end up where they started, having travelled millions of miles. How insane is that?
Meanwhile ‘working from home’ is rightly seen as an attack on all of this meaningless movement. Re-grounding. /7
Until we understand why the ‘traditional’ cultures we’ve now displaced made their most sacred thing PLACE, none of this will stop.
Until within our own cultures we re-sacralize HOME. Until we understand place again, our deepest thing. /8
We ended up here by being imperial cultures of global exploration and accumulation. Our imitative social DNA (all cultures are run by imitation) then turned this into a cultural form.
Which we’re now stuck inside. We do nothing but move around, and don’t understand why. /9
It sort of feels good, necessary even. But it never satisfies, we’re always planning the next trip. Not just in the travel sense, even just ‘what are you *doing’ on the weekend’?
Always doing. Movement, activity. Never just being. /10
Never enjoying the sacred experience of being at home. The experience that the longest civilisations in history placed at their centre.
The most disgusting violation of this pandemic has been the deliberate driving of infection, into our homes. /11
Now the most dangerous place for most of us. Because governments and business refuse to control infection in public and work spaces.
Just one more assault on home, physically and conceptually. /end