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Feedback from Mrs. ELIZEON, Prefect of Aude, regarding the COVID19 crisis management and the world after it

What if the future world was one of solicitude?

Rather than protection or welfare: solicitude.

The health crisis linked to the Covid-19 pandemic that we are facing has shown two concomitant attitudes among a large number of French people: on the one hand, a spirit of solidarity with health professionals, the neighborhood, the most fragile people and on the other, a certain inability to grasp the meaning of the strategy adopted by the Government to manage the crisis.

Remarkable facts: the pharmacists accepted - without opposing that they were not trained to be - the sentries for women victims of domestic violence; the teachers agreed to keep the children of professionals mobilized to manage the crisis every day of the week and even on weekends and school holidays; the farmers were able to set up in three days short circuits and direct sales from producer to consumer; the neighbors gathered around the night noise issued from the musician of the district playing at the window; Sunday dressmakers created and distributed masks. Solidarity is indeed in these moments of crisis. The next world must be able to maintain and develop it.

At the same time, everything is going on as if no one had understood the sense of management of this crisis: the sense of lockdown, the sense of the superiority of the collective over the individual, the sense of what we, French people, have to do together and what makes us a society.

The spontaneous generations of joggers went massively to use the bitumen in the evening at 7:00 p.m. after having, perhaps, refused to go to work during the day. Lonely hikers considered that they could walk since they were alone and therefore did not risk anything, without thinking that in a period of lockdown each of us is a potential lonely hiker. Masks have been stolen and stocks diverted from their final recipients. Specialists in virology, infectious disease and other methodology have clashed through the media, adding the fear of indecision and wrong choice to that generated by the contagiousness of the virus. Direction, which describes both the path and the destination, no longer exists. Has it ever existed?

However, it seems that it is up to the State, through priority public policies, to decide what the French have to do together, to define this "common good" that should be preserved, consolidate and develop. The current health crisis has made it possible to identify some meanings of this common good for all: it is clear that health, knowledge, commitment and the economy are part of it. "Preserve, consolidate and develop", these ambitions are found in one of the possible definitions of care, which in French can be translated by the term of solicitude.

What if in the world of future, the State was neither protective nor providential? What if in the next world we choose was a State of solicitude?

 

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