Pissing in the Pool

A calm image to help soothe a building anger. Just about the only thing this government has done right this year has been to put a lot of effort into securing vaccines, and being successful too. It probably comes down to no more than a simple willingness to spend a lot of money and outbid other countries. I don’t see that as being particularly hard, which is probably just as well. This government can scarcely have any time left to govern when it has to allocate most of its resources to cleaning up all the internal disasters it creates for itself. We could have been the leader in making vaccines readily available for more than just the rich countries of the world. We blew the opportunity. It’s likely there will be a huge price to be paid for such shortsightedness.

I’m always on the lookout for synchronicities. I experienced a wonderful one today. I usually read for an hour before I start writing for the day. It warms me up for the hard work ahead.

I first came across this on a blog I regularly read, from Cory Doctorow …

Dividing the world into vaccine haves and have-nots is like dividing a swimming pool so it has a “pissing end” and a “no pissing” end. We’re still all in the same pool. Humanity has a shared epidemiological destiny.

There’s no arguing with that. It was still in my head when I picked up my current book, Brit Bennett’s outstanding novel, The Vanishing Half, with a plot centred around questions of race in America. I carried on where I left off, starting a new section on page 159. The first paragraph referenced segregation in public pools. Then …

Of course the water mixed from one side to another, and if you peed on the coloured side—which Desiree, giggling, always threatened to do— it would eventually make its way to the white side.

What were the chances? I took it to mean that I should share that with you here. It’s a pretty powerful analogy for all sorts of situations. Humanity has a shared origin, a shared experience of the world, a shared fate. How is that is not universally recognised?