Dear Oscar,

I was noticing how easy it is to breathe. I was thinking about it because in the midst of the pandemic which is currently gripping and affecting the entire planet, it is still easy to breathe. Easy to breathe even though we are constantly being told that air quality is deteriorating and that the lungs of the earth, the rain forests of the Amazon, are being decimated. My breath still flows, in and out, regulated, barely noticeable, expected, in spite of dire warnings that traffic pollution is choking our major cities, and that we as a race are susceptible to the blocking of our airways through allergic reaction, through infection and the dreaded virus of the pandemic itself. There is an ongoing and ever increasing narrative which seems to threaten even this most basic of requirements – the fear that we have created a planet where it will no longer be possible to breathe, and that that will be our collective demise. I wonder why it is that we have to subject ourselves to such a level of fear?

Of course I am also quick to acknowledge that if any one of us does suffer any form of breathing difficulties then of course measures need to be taken to protect us. It is self evident that the most basic of life forming activities have to be safeguarded above all else, and that should any of the threats that are so meticulously detailed come to have actual impact, then we as a collective, as a human race, need to eradicate them. But still I am left wondering why it is that these threats, generating abject fear in very many subjects, have to be the grand narrative trope of our age. We are poisoning and choking ourselves, or so the story goes, and no matter what efforts we put in place to try to counter this, the creeping certitude of annihilation is everywhere apparent. This is the undercurrent of out age, the subtext, as if we as a race will bring it upon ourselves because we know no better, because we are sinners, because we give in to greed and lust and all seven of the seven deadly sins. Because we are stupid children who require nothing but self satisfaction, a kind of self-pleasuring and self indulgence, no matter what the consequences for those around us or for the world itself. Oscar, dear, I just do not buy it.

Yes I know that I am compromised, that I am co-opted into ways of being that I might come to question, that I take flights, and drive a car, eat some mass produced foodstuffs, drop a piece of litter once in a blue moon, but I cannot recognise myself as the arch villain out to destroy the planet. I am conscious and aware and do my best, as do most human subjects, to avoid the sorts of consequences with which I am being threatened. And if I do not understand all of those threats, because the big businesses and corporate giants, the state monopolies and intensive farming techniques, keep me ignorant, despite my enquiring mind, then all I can do is all that I do.

I know that your world was not encountering this, not to the same degree. But you were classified as a sinner by your society, to both a greater and a lesser extent, and you were branded by your world, and made to live out a life ever conscious of the sins you had supposedly committed, and I just have a suspicion that such tropes are endlessly repeated, if differently classified, just to keep us all controlled. You can do this, you cannot do that … we are feeling it all keenly at the moment.

Best wishes to you, as ever,

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.