Being Civil

There are times in your life that you realise that you realise that other countries don't have something you thought were stock-standard; and also when you find that apparently you've gone through life without something that others find a fixture in their lives. New Zealand doesn't have a government issued identity card, we have options to confirm our identification with documents with other purposes (birth certificates, drivers licence or passport). Swiping bank and credit cards is rare in China so most shops do not have devices to receive payment. (Credit cards are mainly for online payments.) 

It might comes a surprise to many people that New Zealand has made its way in the 180 years since the Treaty without making a single constitution document. I remember only learning that in university when I had to do a paper of law in my first year of university. Although I'd gone through life without it, I had heard of the US Constitution often invoked on television, mostly by its Amendments, to know that it was an important bulwark to protect inalienable rights. My experience of New Zealand life was that we'd done pretty well without one, but I concede that it might have been just because of the lack of a malicious person or group coming to power who would take advantage of the fact that there is nothing providing a solid foundation to the case law or founding documents. All of the statutes could be amended. The Bill of Rights is a statute, and thus a slim majority could technically overturn it. If you've read C. K. Stead's Smith's Dream you get a taste of a vision of New Zealand under military rule. And some the privations of the Covid-lockdown here apparently evoked the feeling that rights were infringed or that there was some slippery slope in effect. 

On the topic of constitutions, if you look at countries with constitutions, it hasn't stopped rights being trampled. The constitutions might have given the citizenry a terminology for speaking about their rights and how to protest their infringement, and perhaps in the passing of one regime to another, it provides a way to convict their previous leaders, but I believe the same would be true in a country without a constitution. 

I have heard the word "tyranny" used to describe New Zealand's approach. It sounds rather overblown, and my first instinct was to write it off as politically-biased people wanting to sound off against the current government and its leader. (There are numerous people I know for whom she can do no right.) However it does pay to consider what curbs we have had on our normal freedoms in this extraordinary eight weeks. I'd list them as:

• Firstly requiring people to stay home and only stay in small bubbles 
• Police warning people who did activity in contravention of the rules set out by the Director General of Health
• Preventing people from attending the deaths of loved ones
• The impeding of travel by road with checkpoints and no domestic flights
• Closing businesses that opened against the rules for the particular alert levels
• Issuing warnings for breach of the rules.

To me, most of these things would feel like violations if you did not subscribe to the reasoning behind them, and so even though tyranny sounds like a stretch, you can understand the emotional reaction. No-one likes to be told they can't do what they take for granted and consider within their autonomy. This is still true for people doing patently illegal or unethical things, which they think are justified in doing.

I have mentioned JC a bit on this blog. Things came to a head last week. It was a week of apparent good news: We were going back to campus! He'd been teaching at home in the preceding weeks. I knew that he didn't approve of the lockdown but he also knew that there was no way around it. Last week all classes finally returned to campus for three days of campus study (with restrictions) and two days of online study for all classes. It wasn't my ideal way, but with only one of our two floors open, it was the only way to guarantee that 100 people or more weren't in the centre at the same time. There was also no access to the common room which had the water cooler, something I had wanted but was overruled by other members of the Executive. JC was forcefully inquisitive as to the exact rationale of these, whether it was a government mandate that we could only have three days a week on campus. I explained that the government sets the guidelines and the school seeks to meet them and ensure safety and avoid risk. He interpreted it as me deciding to allow only three days a week, and forcing students to get water from the toilets. He then went on to represent his students' concerns. I responded that I appreciated his desire to represent them, but many of them are cases in the process of resolution and we have staff and their agents to handle it. He wanted his protest to be noted. I noted it. I already knew he was sceptical of the thread of Covid-19 and was outspoken on Facebook about the "cure being worse than the illness" and he had a particularly, plausibly misogynistic though I'm sure he'd deny it, fixation on Jacinda Ardern.

The next day in the afternoon, a staff member arrived, poked his head in my door and said something like: "Oh, can you believe JC?" and tipped me off to check our teachers' Team page where he'd written at length (without @'ing everyone so there was no notification) and included an attachment of a one hour twenty minute video from his online class. The video was from the previous night where he decided to interview each of his students about their dissatisfaction with the school's decision to do only three days on campus, and some other gripes. He vented his frustration to them and said that he disagreed with the approach taken by our school (and incidentally by most schools and elected bodies). He included a political rant and a threat to go to the media. Apparently, the class then had a break and continued the class on the topic of Mood Food.

That was the last class he was to teach at our school - he had already been given notice due to the pandemic and student numbers so he will have his leisure while his notice ticks down. I taught the following two evenings (which went really well despite three of them previously not happy with me). My senior teacher stepped in to teach the class from Friday onward. JC is still active trying to stir something about his "firing", and he's spending his extra time being even more active on Facebook, although nothing too pointed at the company or me. He is stuck on the theme that everyone is supporting participatory fascism and wilfully having our rights taken away. He's big on freedoms.

Ironically, two days later, I could estimate that even after the Friday graduations, with all classes on site that our school would have fewer than 100 people on site at any one time starting this Monday. So I got approval to have classes five days on campus. And I bested resistance to access to the water cooler for students. If he had held himself together, his targets for outrage would have been addressed. But probably not the rage in his chest.

It has just been Memorial Weekend in the US, where going by the media a large number of people have headed to parties and the beach. Our equivalent, Anzac day, was sombre under lockdown. Both occasions are literally commemorating "those who gave their lives for our freedom." (To be clear, it's a bit of a stretch for Korean and Vietnam war vets but I'm sure the sacrifice is all the same; and the feeling of threat was the same, too.) But the odd thing is that if we keep it as a World War II scenario where the real fascists are amassing at your border or that of an ally, the potential sacrifice of one's life or the imperilling of the lives of others in the fight for preserving the freedom of your people seems realistic. The seizure of freedoms by those fascists would be the extermination of peoples; would be the loss of all democratic rights; would be the death of dissenters; would be the smothering of the freedom of the press. Flouting rules or guidelines a la Memorial Weekend is really a perversion of this, making people give up their lives en masse for mundane freedoms like having your hair cut.

Rant over. BUT even I raised an eyebrow that the Parliament recently passed laws which included the possibility under pandemic alert levels for police to enter private places without a warrant...

Downsizing

This evening, another teacher leaves. In three weeks after that, somewhere between two and four leave us. It's not a good feeling. We can only try to soften the blow. Students will complain. They'll be buffeted between class mergers and collapses. But at the end of the day the numbers in and the numbers out will decide the situation. The border won't be opening any time soon and things will continue to wind down. Next week we'll be partially back on site with classes on campus three days a week. It'll be a big thing for all to be back even if it's looking grim.

I'm still running lucky. I've managed to show enough value in my resourcefulness and common sense to have been redirected into a major project. There is a great likelihood that I might be into a major position of use in June. It's a perverse feeling to be getting an opportunity and a path to greater things amongst the carnage. It's often said that the word for crisis in Chinese ("weiji") is made of the characters for danger ("wei") and opportunity ("ji"), and I guess I'm doing well in a Chinese crisis.

But work-wise there is a horrendous overlap where the work is still heavy and all the supports are being pared back and diminished. I'm trying to pass on my duties to my senior teacher, who is effectively down to 25 hours a week from 40. Our awesome student support is now on 4 days a week. We let go of our receptionist the day before lockdown so once we get back, we'll be stretched. My line manager keeps telling me that I should focus on my project but the student issues haven't yet receded and the logistics of bringing people back to campus is not light, and I'm the one who'll be covering the task.

So it'll be a period of long days and not so idle weekends.

In the past, of Fridays, I would have had more of a thought or trend in the pandemic. I haven't had as much energy or time to wonder. In New Zealand, there is great hope that our chapter is over for the time being, and that there is no second wave. With over 7,000 tests processed in the last day, and only one residual case turning up I'm pretty confident. I certainly hope so, at least, because Friday night on Mt Eden did not show much in the way of social distancing. I guess we'll have to wait for June to really know if the sudden social exuberance has any epidemiological consequences.

The world under lockdown has flattened the curve in most countries, and only the countries that weren't doing it terribly well have been left with a terrible churn of cases and deaths. The United States deaths have dropped below 2000 a day and yo-yo between 1000 and about 1750 depending on the day of the week. If heat doesn't have much effect on covid, and the "re-opening" is as open as it sounds, I think the States could be in for what happened to the world in the first stage of the outbreak: deaths surged in a central are, Wuhan and Hubei Province, scattering out seeds to other provinces and a few to other countries. The world death rate slumped in late February after the burn in the early part of the month. But by 8 March, the rest of the world's combined daily deaths exceeded the highest day of deaths in China. I feel this could be like the US. New York is the Wuhan of America, and the populous lockdown states are like the neighbouring cities. All the iffily governed states that closed late or opened early are doing exactly what other badly affected countries did, and it takes some time to bite. From a timeline, it should be starting now. (Two weeks since the 1 May opening.) For their sakes, that's wrong. Two metrics to look at over the next week. If any day can exceed 30,000 cases in a day, or if any days can get back over 2,000 deaths, they might be heading into a world of tears...

The day after Friday part 2

Thank god, it's not Friday. Fridays are now the day where miracles are expected. It's a day of last minute missives, and unexpected logistical tasks. Fridays are now the day to talk about departures. Yesterday was the last day for one of our staff members. Last night we had a Zoom room party with my team, which pleasingly lasted for two hours. The previous Friday was also a farewell. 

God save the United States of America. I don't say that lightly. In fact, my tendencies of late are to hope that idiosyncrasies of countries, their special character, might have some exceptionalism in it. Besides the obvious catastrophe of New York, which is not Wuhan, a certain degree of blitheness and haphazardness in the States has not seen a second, third or fourth epicentre of magnitude yet to materialise. Yet. 

Yet, there is an inevitability of it all. Infectious or not, Covid-19 does seem to take its time to get settled before it gets critical mass. But in exponential fashion, soon as this mass is achieved, it is a juggernaut that only complete lockdowns can arrest. Many states whose numbers have not fallen, just plateaued for a period, have run out of patience and are starting to open up again. Last Friday, they had the most reported daily new cases since the beginning - 38,958 new cases. Today might be a Saturday but they've already reported over 35,000 new cases in a 24 hour period. These are huge numbers, and proof the virus is everywhere. There is no way for contact tracing can work with this many cases. In fact, in the states, there is an almost an incredulity that anyone would do this fandangled contract tracing.

With our 3 new cases a day in New Zealand, we still aren't allowed to do much. Even in Level 2, our school will need to be able to know the details of everyone on our sites with times of entry and exit. 

I'll leave it at that. I'm glad we're beating this thing. Although she is a politician, I'll just state that for Brand New Zealand, Jacinda has a lot of value in her manner alone. Whether it was the mosque attack last year or this, separating the enormity of each case and focussing on the positivity of view, the rest of the world is enjoying this representation and leadership of New Zealand. I selfishly hope this holds our nation in good stead too after this.