Last weekend presented a surreal landscape. A diktat from upon ‘high’, hugely criticised for its inopportune timing, was to my amazement scrupulously observed from what I could tell from my topmost balcony, writes Glenn Maffia.
I reside overlooking one of the three major thoroughfares which feed traffic into and out of Didim and I was somewhat jubilant that people adhered to such a dramatic and necessary decision.
As I mentioned above, the timing was unfortunate as it created a stampede to obtain essentials deemed crucial for the weekend’s survival. I was lucky as my cigarette stock was sufficiently high.
Nonetheless, the single digit amount of people I witnessed over the course of the day solemnly traipsing along with two loaves of much needed, and you can take that as a pun, bread, (where were the five fishes on this Easter period?) was anathema from the norm.
No children stirred upon the streets gargling their laughter to split the silence. What few dissident hedonists were impertinently driving were harried by the regular patrolling Polis cars, loudspeakers blaring out telling these errant souls precisely where to go.
Those laissez-fare macho caricatures, too prevalent here, were humbled through the fear correctly exerted by the state diktat. We are no longer expressing the vanity of the “Me” mentality so incumbent in the neo-liberal philosophical doctrine, but a more collective and humanitarian perspective of a well-being for all. Or so it briefly appeared to me.
Therefore, Saturday and Sunday passed in absolute bliss within a blessed silence that is rarely witnessed, and adherence to the proscribed law that is so often construed as being “Nothing to do with me”.
One may get away with such an attitude too often at a local level, and an “I’ve got connections” wave of a blasé hand. Though everyone knew, this was an Ankara decree; no one was going to take that on flippantly. Nor were the policing community.
Though what a contrast come the sunny benevolent, free from ‘tyranny’, Monday.
I had to go to the bank. Neither completely enamoured by the prospect of getting onto an overcrowded dolmus (local bus), if they were indeed running, nor of walking through throngs of people, I asked a friend of mine if he could give me a lift. He graciously accented to do so.
Driving into Yenihisar, I was immediately vilifying people, to my friend, for not taking any heed of ‘social distancing’ advice. Does this really require any strengthening of the fateful consequences which can, and do so often, occur? I was appalled at such a causal disregard of both themselves and other people. This virus is here for months, probably years, not merely a weekend. Is that difficult to understand?
After the ‘fear of reprisals’ from the Ankara Government, all now, it seemed, was, “OK, we’re back to normal”. But there will be no more ‘normal’, well not until a vaccine has been tried and tested and then rolled out to the general population. And even then, ‘Normal’ shall take upon a different hue, at least politically. I’m, again, referring to neo-liberalism.
Though that is for later, as for the immediate, that place in time where we live now, one cannot afford to be glib of ‘cause and effect’.
I was certainly masked and gloved (I was going to the bank), but many of those I observed were not, and standing in tight queues awaiting permission to enter the doors of the national banks.
Fortuitously, my bank is not, and apart from two people using the ATM machines at the entrance, of which I scurried past, I was alone within the establishment. The ‘teller’ (quite a contradictory name for someone with knowledge of one’s accounts) gloved herself up to pass over the requested money. The gloves were blue in colour and reminded me of washing-up gloves. My mind conjuered the idle joke of ‘money-laundering’.
I suppose that there shall be many a ‘one-line joker in a public bar’ that shall rip that idle observation off as their own…if they survive.