Early every morning, I walk down to the local super-market, the store identity will remain a secret, to protect others who may be involved.
My brother allows me to scratch through the waste bins, picking at what is edible, always I will find an unopened bread, which I need to slip into my carrier back, out of site of the surveillance cameras, then as I leave, I walk way without sideward glance at my brother.
This loaf will keep my wife and I alive, till tomorrow, I walk around the shopping area, looking for an alcohol bottle that my just have found its way onto my path, and maybe just that top of anything that I have craved for 23 days now, but alas, hundreds of thirsty and hungry feet have already swept the pavements of Johannesburg.
For the past two weeks, no longer can the smallest cigarette butt be found, life switches between the need for food, nicotine, and alcohol.
The nicotine and alcohol, banned to protect my elderly immune system, an immune system that has thrived on this habit for years, today, for the first time, I feel my immune system to be compromised, and compromised by the withdrawal symptoms that won’t go away.
I pass the traffic-light intersection, on the eight corners, hobos, pedlars, traffickers, individually, but united, trying to sell drugs to me my mindset is tempted, I consider the dagga, it does after-all contain healing elements, and it will satisfy both needs.
Maybe when the virus attacks me, my wife will understand if I bring the drugs home.
My last port of call, is a walk past the bottle store, at this stage, the urge is great, but I am to afraid to use the tool that I carry in my bag, just in case. I leave it on the criminal element who are attacking bottle-stores around the country, but I am never so lucky.
Every Radio and TV programme, promotes their support for the total lockdown, these calls ring in my mind every step that I take, hidden in the message, is that things will return to normal when this is all over.
I no longer know what ‘this’ is, and I can’t see my daily ritual ever changing returning to normal.
Will there ever be a normal?
Kaalvoet:
When I get home, I Google research all day very day, complements a neighbours Wi-fi, desperately looking for President Ramaphosa’s as yet disclosed scientific / medical research that confirms that the Coronavirus, attaches you, because of the nicotine or alcohol.
This morning I find what I am looking for, one of South Africa’s “His Master’s Voice” the surgeon general of the USA, and I quote the full article:
New York Times:
Why Coronavirus Is Killing African-Americans More Than Others
Higher rates of infection and death among minorities demonstrate the racial character of inequality in America.
By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
April 14, 2020
We know that Covid-19 is killing African-Americans at greater rates than any other group. You can see this most clearly in the South. In Louisiana, blacks account for 70 percent of the deaths but 33 percent of the population. In Alabama, they account for 44 percent of the deaths and 26 percent of the population. South Carolina and Georgia have yet to release information on death disparities, but in both states blacks are more likely to be infected than whites. The pattern exists in the North as well, where African-American populations in cities like Chicago and Milwaukee have high infection and death rates.
Federal officials have tied these disparities to individual behavior — the surgeon general of the United States, Jerome Adams, who is African-American, urged blacks and other communities of color to “avoid alcohol, tobacco and drugs” as if this was a particular problem for those groups.
The Kaalvoet Comment:
The paragraph supra, researched by the United States surgeon general, Jerome Adams, is the only research that I can find, and based on this research, we extend ‘the no smoking, no drinking’ principle, in South Africa.
The author of this New Your Times article, in the balance of this article infra, confirms my white Apartheid mindset, they are inclined to be infected, and they will bring their infection into the ‘service sector jobs’ I should sacrifice, as this will prevent the blacks from moving into my safe zone, which will cause my death.
The author, Jamelle Bouie continues;
In truth, black susceptibility to infection and death in the coronavirus pandemic has everything to do with the racial character of inequality in the United States.
To use just a few, relevant examples, black Americans are more likely to work in service sector jobs, least likely to own a car and least likely to own their homes. They are therefore more likely to be in close contact with other people, from the ways they travel to the kinds of work they do to the conditions in which they live.
Today’s disparities of health flow directly from yesterday’s disparities of wealth and opportunity. That African-Americans are overrepresented in service-sector jobs reflects a history of racially segmented labor markets that kept them at the bottom of the economic ladder; that they are less likely to own their own homes reflects a history of stark housing discrimination, state-sanctioned and state-sponsored. And if black Americans are more likely to suffer the comorbidities that make Covid-19 more deadly, it’s because those ailments are tied to the segregation and concentrated poverty that still mark their communities.
What’s important to understand is that this racialized inequality isn’t a mistake — it isn’t a flaw in the system. It reflects something in the character of American capitalism itself, a deep logic that produces the same outcomes, again and again.
South Africa’s lockdown system, is aimed at protecting me, and elderly white suburbanite, at the expense of innocent lives of the people ‘who would not listen’.
Cedric de la Harpe