With the pandemic, what have we become?

The pandemic alone is destroying what remains of optimism, pleasure in living, joviality, but also respect for others, dignity and collective pride of Quebecers.

Every day brings bad news. Every day plunges us into disappointments of all kinds.

We thought we were dominating the health situation thanks to passports reserved for vaccinated people and now the announcement of the withdrawal of these same passports contradicts the need for yesterday.

While in Western countries we seem to live in relative normality, in Quebec, citizens are struggling to find a semblance of life before the virus.

Inferiority

Mental health specialists have looked at our psychological behavior through language in particular. For example, in Quebec we tend to use negative expressions. We say of a woman, “she is not worse”, to mean that she is pretty or attractive. René Lévesque himself declared in 1976 on election night: “We are not a small people, we are perhaps something like a great people! Some believe that this sentence clearly indicates the inferiority complex of Quebecers, a defeated people, never a winner.

The way we live through the pandemic says a lot about our collective morale. In Quebec, the pandemic has invaded our lives. We live it in a suffocating hysteria. We only exist through it. Under its influence, we are unable, it seems, to take some distance which will allow us to believe that our life does not completely escape us. And especially to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Unlike Europeans, who have gone through centuries of wars, including the two world wars of the 20th^and century, we are losing all sense of proportion. We go so far as to compare our fate to that of peoples who have gone through collective dramas throughout their history.

One of the reasons that would explain our inability to put a distance between us and this pandemic is our relationship to the disease.

Health

French television asked me several years ago about the results of a poll in a French women’s magazine on the concerns of readers from Western countries. The survey revealed that in Quebec, women between the ages of 20 and 45 placed health in second place after love and before personal success. I explained that it was summed up by the phrase, “I am sick, therefore I am”.

COVID-19 has resulted in the revelation of the flaws in our health system, which has been so praised for decades. This leads many to show fatalism in the face of the deaths that this has caused while remaining the prey of a deaf anguish of not having access to hospitals.

With the pandemic, whole sections of our institutions seem to be collapsing. Like the DPJ, help for the homeless, the mentally ill, the old, again and again.

And now we are firing red balls at the Legault government and, to tell the truth, at all the opposition parties, which only gather predictable support that hardly leads to power. The search for a savior is the danger that awaits us. This will be tomorrow’s column.