Saturday

I need to see your Immunity Papers, please

I put it to a neighbour passing my locked (waist-high) front gate that the community institute three kinds of armbands according to our coronavirus status. Further dialogue with friends on the ethics of this brought me to only advocating one kind of armband; the reassuring kind, if it can be believed. I suggest that all those with the coronavirus antibodies make green armbands and wear them in order to give reassurance and to say that you are happy for other members of the community to ask for your immunity papers if they are to engage in further business/closeness with you. The test result documentation I guess you'll have uploaded online? Thus, in this imagined near future, you can call out perhaps a web address or social media account details by which the other, standing a few metres away, can check your papers -perhaps with reference to a government website- before allowing you or your paper copy of the (presumed) immunity papers closer.

Personally, I can’t wait to meet a green armband wearer who is available to do residential care work, which consumes 70 hours a week in #DadAndSonIsolation. There’s plenty of space in this house with small front and back gardens and to have someone else sharing the burden; someone who didn’t need telling every day that there is a pandemic (being responded to by) reshaping society the world over, would free me up not only to blog with my chosen co-writers -today Maria Arpa of the Centre for Peaceful Solutions- but also to co-host teleconferences on ways of building social capital freeing up communities from so much dependence on however the monetary economies end up being reshaped.

I introduce Maria as a colleague for over 15 years. Maria Arpa and I both adopt a Marshall-Rosenberg inspired approach to our mediation work; running The Centre for Peaceful Solutions (charity) and Mediation Support Ltd respectively. We have written one key article -now a blogpost- together, which was submitted over the weekend before the 2019 General Election to the Hastings Independent Press. The piece published in the Hastings Independent instead, entitled “Disability And The Minimum Wage” was a transcript of the response of all four of us Parliamentary Candidates to a digging up of a Facebook “like” by the Conservative Candidate two years previously; which became the controversy of the whole election in Hastings and Rye, with ongoing resentment and misunderstanding present. I wish I knew how to get the blogpost (rejected for publication in the Hastings Independent more widely read and reflected upon): “ I’ve got your BaƧk, Sally Ann and Peter”, Maria Arpa has agreed to write another two blog pieces with me here, unfolding what I’m hashtagging as #PandemicEraEthics. So, Immunity papers, Maria?

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