Sunday 2 August 2020

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 I have been finding it very difficult to put any coherent thought together about anything that is happening in the world since February - not about Covid, not about the upcoming US Presidential elections, not about what it feels like to be a new citizen in this country at this very moment in time, where going back to somewhere else or going anywhere at all has become impossible. What it is like to only imagine Europe from a distance, a Europe that now has borders for everyone again, not just for the unfortunate, and all of that from a country that now has non-porous internal borders (how far away Melbourne and Sydney feel). I find it impossible to speak about the question of policing - of seeing a movement emerge that seriously questions the ideology, scope and methods of policing - at the same time as policing has been put at the centre of containing this virus, and what these extended powers will mean post-Covid (while we are still seeing the fall-out of extended powers from the last great international crisis, local police forces in the United States outfitted like military invasion forces). A country in which the police can knock on doors to check if you are home, a world in which a country can forbid its citizens to leave. How much of this transition from Vienna to Adelaide has been about realising what it means to have a different history, or a different interpretation of history, a lack of experience with a fascist state (or at the same time, a reminder that none of this is unprecedented, just unprecedented for non-indigenous Australians). What it means to dig deeper into this parallel between a post 9/11 world and now - in both cases, US presidents that at the time were unbearable, but this one, now, has moved the post when it comes to not being able to believe what reality has become so many times that the only remaining feeling is disorientation and dizziness, a constant questioning of everything. 

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