Saturday 24 September 2022

Tous Les Mêmes -- "We’re all the same”

Stromae, “Tous Les Mêmes”. Click for the vid.
Quite one of his best
“All the same”. We men, that is. Not women. Women are all different, of course. And better. 

Stromae does the fantastic “Tous les Mêmes“, and also sings of the workers during Covid in Santé . The true heroes.  Not the laptop class, but the working class. Good on him. 

The pandemic was when we learnt we weren’t really all the same. There were those with their guaranteed incomes -- the "laptop class”: the media, the experts, the academics, the civil servants, the comfortable retirees -- and then there’s the “working class”, those out there making a living, making work for themselves and others, running pubs, making subs, manning checkouts, trucking orders, serving the laptop class. But heaven help them they dared complain, about being kept from their work -- then it was all “so you want to kill grandma” and how dare you, for “one death is too many”. Enough! For me that is.

Most of my friends and all of my family, me included, are members of the laptop class. All all either salaried or retired. I don’t know if they understand what the working class have gone through. Many, for sure, of the laptop class are oblivious. To the true suffering and for many the true disaster of this pandemic. Which for the laptop class was measured only in deaths. Not in lives ruined. 

The reason I mention this now, at the fag-end (one hopes) of the pandemic, is that there’s a renewed push, I discern, to go back to days of lockdowns, because there’s yet another wave looming. And Long Covid. And children sickened. We can’t have that, so they say, so more lockdown. The working class, plus laptop class traitors like me, must resist. We must resist more lockdowns. 

Me -- a laptop class member, retired and comfortable, but a traitor to my class -- I want us to ignore the looming waves. I’m right in its path of a wave, very vulnerable, as an elderly with comorbidities. But still, I don’t want the world to shut down again, for the sake of we vulnerable. Yet there are plenty who do. Especially doctors and experts. Who want us to contemplate and be afraid, of the horrid deaths from covid, of the fact that young ones do die of it, of the possibility of a new variant, of... whatever, of.... anything. Safetyism run riot.

ADDED: There’s another view, which maybe is also kind of in the space of Stromae. Adam Carolla talking to Michael Yo, about his thoughts on “chickthink”. Here.