We all find ways of getting through lockdown. Go to Salut! Live, my folk and folk-rock music site, and see what I've been up to.
Bill Taylor contributes there as he does here. A few weeks ago, he also started posting daily Facebook updates, each accompanied by a photograph from his vast repertoire, on life in Toronto during the coronavirus crisis. He probably expected to run out of ideas after a week or so.
His readers lapped up everything he posted and have refused to allow him to let go. Today's piece is his 50th. Salut! started late but has reproduced just over half of them. Bill felt, as I did, that as a series here, Covid-19 Diaries had run its course. But I still publish any items my friends care to offer and dip into Bill's Facebook pages from time to time. He doesn't agree but I am sure there's a slim volume in these jottings of his, though it would require him or a publisher to move fairly quickly ....
Bucolic notes from the trenches:
Social upheaval can come in many forms.
It’s not just people rioting for the right to dye-jobs and pedicures on demand or convincing themselves that a warm, sunny day and an inviting beach supersede whatever the laws of good sense and separation might lay down.
Where two or three are gathered and then two or three more and two or three more until finally enough are gathered to justify blocking traffic, waving banners and chanting slogans – that’s an external manifestation.
It tends to get more headlines than results. And perhaps a few broken heads. Nobody wins.
The real upheaval comes from within on little cat’s feet. Hardly anyone notices it happening.
As I’ve mentioned before – 50 days in, you’ll forgive me I hope if I repeat myself occasionally – the revolution may not come from people on the streets in droves but off the streets in droves.
“There’s something happening here,” Buffalo Springfield sang back in the ’60s, “but what it is ain’t exactly clear.”
When it becomes clear, it may be too late to reverse it.
It won’t happen overnight – nothing does any more – but perhaps the pandemic could spell an end to big-city living as we know it. The beginning of the end, at least.
People, especially those already accustomed to summering at weekend cottages, will come to realize that they don’t have to live in the city at all.
They can sell their cramped rowhouses in, say, downtown Toronto for seven-figure sums and buy a sizeable spread in a nice little town somewhere. The sort of place where physical distancing just naturally takes care of itself. And have a chunk of money left over.
Work isn’t a problem. They’ve been working from home for weeks. Home can be anywhere.
Michelle Rempel-Garner, Conservative MP and former cabinet minister, is serving her Calgary constituents from Oklahoma, for goodness sake. That, perhaps, is a little extreme but still...
Drive maybe once a month to a supermarket to stock up on supplies, and throw in the occasional trip into the city. The rest of the time – revitalize all those small local businesses that have been suffering so much.
The vendors of artisanal wares who up until this year have relied on the tourist trade for their livelihood?
They could change their business plan just a little – concentrate less on little gingham covers for their honey pots and more on the honey itself. And take the damned scent out of the damned candles.
Sell more to the locals and less to the come-from-aways. That kind of thing. Quilting bees to make bedding rather than decorative wall-hangings.
A mix of self-sufficiency and community sufficiency.
Long-term, this would likely push rural property prices up and Toronto (or wherever) prices down. Which might be no bad thing.
If you want to get really utopian, it might even do something to redress our affordable-housing shortage.
Get real. That would probably be among the last things to happen.
None of these things are likely to come about. I’m just sitting happily on a big pink cloud. Anyway, I prefer downtown. Wide-open spaces are a fine place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.
All the same, there’s something happening here. The world is changing. The world has changed. We are changing. Fascinating to see, when this is over, just how we’ve changed.
Or perhaps, whatever it turns out to be, we won’t even notice. But that won’t make it any less real.
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