Disobedience, because of you I will survive

By Maria Galindo

I have coronavirus, because although it seems that the disease has not yet entered my body, loved ones have it; because the coronavirus is going through cities I've been through in the past few weeks; because the coronavirus has changed with a trill of the fingers as if it were a miracle, a catastrophe, a tragedy without remedy, absolutely everything. Where you tread is, where you arrive has arrived before and nothing can be thought today, nor done, without the coronavirus in between. It seems that not only do I have coronaviruses, but we all have it, everyone, everyone; all institutions, all countries, all neighborhoods and all activities.

What is clear is that the coronavirus, rather than a disease, appears to be a form of multi-government police and military world dictatorship.

Coronavirus is a fear of contagion.

Coronavirus is a confinement order, however absurd it may be.

The coronavirus is an order of distance, as impossible as this is.

The coronavirus is a permission to suppress all freedoms, which for protection is extended without the right to reply or question.

The coronavirus is a qualification code for the so-called essential activities, where the only thing that is allowed is that we go to work or that we work in telework as a sign that we are alive.

The coronavirus is an instrument that seems effective to erase, minimize, hide or put in parentheses other social and political problems that we have been conceptualizing. Suddenly and magically they disappear under the carpet or behind the giant.

The coronavirus is the elimination of the most vital, democratic and most important social space in our lives, such as the street, that outside that we should not virtually cross and that in many cases was the only space we had left.

Coronavirus is the domain of virtual life, you have to be attached to a network to communicate and know yourself in society.

The coronavirus is the militarization of social life.

It is the closest thing to a dictatorship where there is no information, but in portions calculated to produce fear.

The coronavirus is an apparently legitimate weapon of destruction and prohibition of social protest, where we are told that the most dangerous thing is to get together and get together.

The coronavirus is the restitution of the concept of the border to its most absurd form; They tell us that closing a border is a security measure, when the coronavirus is inside and such closure does not prevent the entry of a microscopic and invisible virus, but rather prevents and classifies the bodies that may enter or leave the borders.

The Schengen space, which is where the coronavirus has spread to this part of the world, where I live, closes its border to the circulation of bodies outside that space and finally fulfills the fascist dream that others they are the danger.

The coronavirus could be the holocaust of the 21st century to generate a mass extermination of people who will die and are dying, because their bodies do not resist the disease and the health systems, they have classified them under a Darwinian logic as part of those who do not they are useful and therefore must die.

The millions of euros of bailout of their colonial economies appear to solve rents, utility bills, salaries, when all that proletarian mass was cutting the sky, saying that there was nowhere to pay the social debt. Now that they are scared to death, obedient and secluded, they are rewarded with the sweet consolation that they will settle their accounts, after having settled those that matter, which are those of corporations and states.

"Socialists" like those who govern Spain, speak of a war that we will all win together. They like the word, they believe that it serves to make body and make disease the supposed ideal enemy that unites us. There is nothing more fascist than declaring a war against society and against democracy, taking advantage of the fear of disease. Nothing more fascist than to make people's houses their jails. Nothing more neoliberal than proclaim the save yourself who can as a tutored solution.

And what happens when the coronavirus crosses the border and reaches countries like Bolivia?

Let us begin by saying that here the coronavirus was already awaited at the door by dengue, which has been killing in the tropics –without headlines in the newspapers– malnourished people, the Wawas, those who live in unhealthy suburban areas. Dengue and coronavirus greeted each other, on one side was tuberculosis and cancer, which in this part of the world are death sentences.

The hospitals built most of them at the beginning of the 20th century with the rise of tin and later modernized, in the seventies of the last century, with the rise of developmentalism, are mamotretos that collapsed a long time ago and where the bad habit of healing people

Since there is a curfew, are all those who make a living from working at night prohibited from subsisting?

Bolivian society is a proletarian society, without wages, without jobs, without industry, where the great mass survive on the streets in a giant and disobedient social fabric. Not a single one of the copied measures fits our real living conditions, not only for debts, but for life itself. Each and every one of those measures copied from economies that have nothing to do with ours, do not protect us from contagion, but rather try to deprive us of forms of subsistence that are life itself.

Our only real alternative is to rethink contagion.

Cultivate contagion, expose ourselves to contagion and disobey to survive.

It is not a suicidal act, it is common sense.

But perhaps in that common sense is all the most powerful sense that we can develop.

What if we decide to prepare our bodies for contagion?

What happens if we assume that we will certainly catch it and go from that certainty processing our fears?

What if, faced with the absurd, authoritarian, and idiotic state response to the coronavirus, we consider the social self-management of disease, weakness, pain, thought, and hope?

What happens if we make fun of border closings?

What happens if we organize ourselves socially?

What if we prepare to kiss the dead and to care for the living and the living outside of prohibitions, that the only thing they are producing is the control of our space and our lives?

What happens if we go from the individual supply to the contagious and festive common pot as we have done so many times?

They will say once again that I am crazy, and that it is best to obey isolation, seclusion, non-contact and non-response to the measures when it is most likely that you, your lover, your friend, your neighbor, or your mother are contagious.

They will say once again that I am crazy when we know that in this society there were never the hospital beds we need and that if we go to their doors right there we will die praying.

We know that the management of the disease will be mostly at home, let's prepare ourselves socially for that.

What if we decide to disobey to survive?

We need to feed ourselves to wait for the disease and change our diet to resist.

We need to look for our kolliris and manufacture these non-pharmaceutical remedies with them, try our bodies and explore what suits us best.

We need coquita to resist hunger and cañahua flour, amaranth, quinoa soup. All that they have taught us to despise.

Let death not catch us huddled in fear by obeying idiotic orders, let us catch kissing, let us catch making love and not war.

May he catch us singing and hugging us, because contagion is imminent.

Because contagion is like breathing.

Not being able to breathe is what the coronavirus condemns us to, rather than due to the disease of seclusion, prohibition and obedience.

Nosferatu comes to mind that in an unforgettable scene, when death is already imminent and the plague embodied in rats has invaded the entire town, everyone sits at a large table in the square to share a collective banquet of resistance. So find us the coronavirus, ready for contagion.

Helen Álvarez Edition - Journalist

* Member of Mujeres Creando