The Body Snatching Years

Something happened and we could all feel it.

We all knew what had happened happened: a pandemic, a genocide, a fire (fires), a flood (floods), a war, a politics.

But listing the events was inadequate to understand what had been done, not just what had happened.

I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what, but I have some rough ideas, looking back now.

The first thing to say is that we were already not ideal.

Heaven was not a place on Earth.

The natural scientists had been warning about biospheric fragility and viral hotspots for years. The social scientists about fascism’s creep and gestating wars.

The warnings in those years were not a case of ‘this thing might happen’ but more a case of ‘this thing over there that is already happening is a sign of a more generalised decay that could spiral out of control given the right conditions.’

You could say the conditions were made right.

You could say that control spiralled.

It started with the outbreak. Sorta. Kinda.

Nothing ever really starts with anything. Everything is contingent on everything else. A trail of causality from the beginning until the end of time.

And one of the contingencies took place in the UK at exactly the same time as the outbreak was taking hold in China: the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn lost an election to Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.

This would matter a lot. It meant things would inevitably get much worse in the UK before they ever got better, if they ever did or could. It meant certain things then happened that definitely wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

It sent a signal. It killed hope. It killed the future. We knew it acutely.

Then, almost exactly three months later, the UK was in lockdown.

A brutal one-two punch for the millions who had been dreaming and working for a better world.

Most countries followed. America did not, preferring a patchwork of stay-at-home, distancing and closures. In the case of a few states, almost nothing was tried at all, other than bleach, horse paste and viral infection.

The great dying had begun and it would never stop.

Until this day it has not stopped.

This is not something we like to think about. We like befores and afters. And from the beginning of the pandemic the after was forced on us.

In March of zero year (zero-ish year, everything contingent etc), scientists warned of the most devastating pandemic in one hundred years.

Two months later, everyone was trying to be normal.

In April, Boris Johnson said the UK “was past the peak of the coronavirus.”

In May, Trump released the opening up America plan.

In June, the UK said the “long national hibernation” was at an end.

The worst was always behind us.

By November, our attempts at normal had provided the bodies that mutated the virus, and hundreds of millions were back in lockdown.

So we all went on the internet and tried to make sense of it (this will become important).

A few months later the vaccine came, and the after once again beckoned.

By late summer 2021, the vulnerable vaccinated, the youth yearning, restless and somewhat vaccinated, the pandemic was over. America’s president said so.

Then more people died of covid after the mass vaccination programme than before.

This is not something we like to think about.

Many people despite being vaccinated, vaccinated and vaccinated again, were disabled by the virus.

This is not something we like to think about.

A few were disabled by the vaccine itself.

This is not something we like to think about.

Five years after the start of the pandemic, in early 2025 in America nearly 1,000 were killed by the virus.

This is not something we want to know about.

The news is greeted with sheer silence. It does not exist as news.

Pandemics don’t end. They just get absorbed in time.

Time.

People said something had shifted in the nature of time. That our experience of time felt different now, off. It felt, somehow, less linear. We were five years further forward but maybe only six months or a year had passed since the outbreak began. Who could know really? Maybe it was just how it felt when you got older. But we’d all got older before, that’s all we’d ever been doing, and somehow it didn’t feel like this. Did it?

We are ourselves, but not.

Maybe it was because the after had been manufactured for us. Everyone had a different reference point for the after. For many people, there has been no after at all.

Our shared experience of time now splintered, pockets of people began residing in different pockets of time.

Maybe this is the multiverse.

Millions died, were disabled, and continue to be harmed, yet unlike the mass casualty event of war, this one is cultural taboo. There are no monuments, no films, no books. There are no hero narratives. No one came to the rescue. You couldn’t kill men to kill the virus (although we tried and called it herd immunity). We couldn’t switchblade drone or hellfire missile our way out of this one.

Despite the early promises of building back better, despite the claps for carers and the mutual aid, in the end there was no national renewal anywhere.

It was just sickness and death and then a quick shuffle back to the grind.

There were no stories to make sense of the dying.

No public remembrances to collectively process grief.

The taboo that had settled over the land sucked the air from places of solace. There was nowhere to consider grief and no one to consider it with. Friends didn’t talk about it. Families didn’t want to. Politicians didn’t want to. Psychologists didn’t want to. Doctors didn’t want to.

“But doctor, ever since I had this virus something hasn’t been right.”

“That’s anxiety, baby.”

If we didn’t talk about it, it probably didn’t happen.

What happens in a pandemic stays in a pandemic.

Except it doesn’t.

And the consequences of this errant belief are now bleeding out everywhere.

The distrust, the anger. The feelings of betrayal. At institutions and establishments—media, medical and political. At friends, family, at ourselves.

For all the reasons, from all the points of view.

We’re beyond the pros, cons and the antis now.

Everyone has a reason to feel betrayed. And betrayal is a powerful emotion. It scars us, changing how we interact with the world. This is dangerous. Because the act of living requires us to be vulnerable. Every day we unconsciously open ourselves up, to strangers, to friends, to the shop assistant, to the train driver. We have to, it’s what makes this all work. Vulnerability greases the gears of society. We have to trust, constantly and implicitly. We have to trust that someone we know or someone we don’t will act in a predictable way for us to get even the most menial of tasks done.

The pandemic disrupted these unconscious bonds of trust.

Billions were made sick. Many were made badly sick. Many millions have never recovered. Obviously many died. These dead have friends and families. And all these people were made sick and killed by someone.

Think of that.

And we were told half truths. We were told lies. Real ones and of omission. By the people and institutions we need to trust to keep this show on normal road.

It was a betrayal. We hardened.

But the taboo meant we couldn’t talk about it, not in real life. This anger, trauma, grief and betrayal.

So we all went on the internet.

And this is what radicalised us.

From the richest man in the world to the average person on the street.

We couldn’t build back better because it was a WEF plan for 15 minute cities where on every street corner we’d be injected with a novel gene therapy that would turn us trans.

We couldn’t build back better because capitalists were losing money as office blocks sat empty while the homeless were being housed, the poor were being fed and the jobless were getting free money. The scam was up.

Choose your narrative.

And while we were on the internet, we saw a genocide.

And this is what radicalised us.

We saw the flayed bodies of little girls hanging from their bedrooms, places of comfort and refuge now mosaics dripping with flesh. We saw hospitals invaded and babies left rotting in incubators. We saw quadriplegics in wheelchairs executed, whole bloodlines exterminated in a maniacal, genocidal frenzy. We saw a population starved and bombed and terrorised, we saw their blood pour onto the streets for eighteen months. For eighteen months we saw the face of pure evil. We saw hell on Earth. And we saw our governments condone it, support it, provide the materiel for the creation of hell.

And we, who weren’t much inclined to trust anyway, not after the virus, were radicalised.

It was another betrayal.

Another bond severed.

We are ourselves, but not.

And while we were online we saw fires and floods.

The biggest fires and floods in the history of fires and floods.

Reaction is muted. And this too can be traced back to zero year.

Just as the outbreak was beginning, the surge in ecological activism was dying. Just another thing that we lost in the fires.

News of the apocalypse that once commanded headlines has been subordinated to all the other news.

We now breeze past climate way-markers with little fanfare.

“One point five to stay alive!” is dead. Not unreasonably, we wonder if we are all dead too.

Because for the last five years we have watched as the world marched over limits and boundaries.

Health boundaries, international law boundaries, climate boundaries, country boundaries, moral boundaries, political boundaries.

The man who, it was widely agreed, had transgressed so many boundaries he could never come back, came back. He too had been online. And this time he bought his online friends with him.

With online radicals now at the heart of empire, America swipes left and right frantically, desperate for a match that can make it feel great again.

In Britain, the government that people turned to for sanity from the bewildering Tory years are detaining dissidents, funding genocide and punishing the disabled.

There are fresh enemies inside and out: immigrants, Russians, Muslims, Hamas, the woke, the sick, the disabled.

They are all the reason why. Even the good liberal media tells us this.

People cheer for weapons of war. To talk of peace is to be weak and pathetic.

We long for the switchblades and the hellfires to protect us.

Evil that has long colonised the hearts of colonisers has been sprung free. Again. As it does, periodically.

The conditions made right, control spiralling.

For too long shame held us back.

Well it won’t hold us back now.

We’ve been hardened.

We turn outwards, we look around.

Everyone is themselves, but not.

I though, am still myself.

I am still myself.

Am I not?