Solidarity

I’ve managed to cheat death, that I know of, twice in my life.

In January 2015 I was living in Paris but home for the holidays in Toronto. I had recently completed my culinary education and had begun my tenure as a stagière (or intern) in patisseries and restaurants for what would be an informative but relatively short life as a chef. One internship down, a little wiser but tired and back with my family, things were good.

A short note about interns; it’s common practice in the French hospitality industry to work the newcomers ragged until they give up or succumb. From what I’ve learned of other industries, this form of indoctrination into the working culture is largely accepted as an important step in a new employee’s life. It builds a sense of camaraderie with not only your peers but those who have faced the trials before you, in times which were no doubt harder. While there’s certainly something to be said for stimulating a passion around your working life, I hope in the future we’re more enlightened about creating unnecessary in-groups and universal barriers to entry, especially for what is essentially just another way to get paid. 

But as I said in my lucky case, things were good. Then I got the news of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the deaths of humans at the hands of other humans because we could’t agree. It’s always sad when violence becomes the result of the disagreement. And especially so when a more general sense of human empathy is made all the more relatable by thinking that it could have been you in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Or worse, since as I came to realize it’s much harder to fear for yourself than for others during a crisis. I heard the news, I reached for my phone, I reached out to everyone I knew to make sure they could still reach for their phone. We were all very lucky. It’s easy to assume that in this case “cheating death” is an exaggeration but we really never know, do we?

It happened again in early 2020 when all over the world people were waiting for the wave of what was then called coronavirus on our news to hit their region. Again, I watched the news and reached out to friends and family. Again, it was with a strange sense of detachment because in the previous year I had moved to Perth, Western Australia.

Perth is popularly recognized as the most isolated major city in the world. The next closest city of more than five hundred thousand people is Adelaide, over two thousand kilometres away. It is quicker to fly to Bali, Indonesia than to reach the capital city of Australia from Perth. This used to be a thing people joked about, back when we would fly for leisure. We’d describe prices in units of trips to Bali and get excited when a new international trend had finally made it to Perth. A Perth native and friend of my wife’s is credited with kicking-off the trend of Quokka selfies but that was before my time. Look it up if you want to see some exceptionally cute Australian fauna which for once won’t try to kill you.

So I found myself in the most isolated city in the world during a global pandemic. People kept asking me if I felt lucky.

The truth was, I felt guilty. Saying someone is lucky isn’t strictly speaking a compliment but I think we’re supposed to receive it like one, with humility and polite acceptance. But I couldn’t accept it and still can’t because it keeps coming up whenever we’re out (which in Perth is a fair bit more than anywhere else these days) because I have a foreign accent.

When you accept a compliment, you’re agreeing to the premise of the statement. This is true whether or not you had any role in the feature being complimented, just like luck. That’s why it’s polite to accept the compliment rather than give an explanation. “Nice eyes; oh I had nothing to do with them” is awkward while “nice eyes; thanks I grew them myself” is weird but acceptable. 

Luck is different because what we’re acknowledging is that we humbly accept we had no role to play in our fortune. If we pretend we did, that’s unusual. 

What I disagree with is the premise. I don’t feel lucky because being apart from my friends and family back home during this struggle doesn’t feel like a blessing.

Toronto had claimed the longest COVID lockdown of any large city. Then Melbourne grabbed the title. What we can definitely agree on, as a friend pointed out, is this is an odd thing to brag about. It does support my view though that there’s something to be said for solidarity, not individualism, at times of crisis. 

I suspect there’s others out there who agree because while I don’t follow hockey (by Canadian standards at least) I know that if there’s an organization which understands struggle it’s the Leafs. We have a similar team in Perth, a much-loved but rarely winning AFL team whose fans will likely already by familiar with the concept that struggle is team-building. 

This seems more than a subconscious suicidal tendency. I don’t think that I secretly (to paraphrase the Chinese proverb) “wish to live in interesting times”. Maybe it’s recognition that when faced squarely with our own extinction (rather than obliquely as with climate change) we cannot only survive but thrive. Even if we don’t, in the words of Steve Rogers, “we’ll do that together, too.”