Politics of the isolation ward: Thoughts on changing the world from a hospital bed

I’m currently lying in hospital, in isolation, undergoing a stem cell transplant for a rather persistent cancer I’ve been living with, on and off, for the past 14 years. When I was first diagnosed in 2012, I lay helpless in a hospital bed, watching with horror as the Marikana Massacre unfolded. Today I lie in bed watching Israel commit genocide in Gaza and bomb various other countries in the Middle East with the full support of the US.

I’m also watching South Africans turn on other Africans in horrific xenophobic violence. I feel so powerless to do anything about any of these events from my hospital bed. But the truth is, even out of hospital beds, in times of good health, I’ve always felt pretty powerless to do anything about these sorts of atrocities.

One thing lying in isolation allows you to do, however, is engage in a lot of deep thinking, and I’ve realised I’m not okay with doing nothing anymore. I’ve spent my downtime trying to figure out where many of our problems lie and who should be held to account. I’m not an academic. I’m a music therapist and a musician. So this might all sound a little simplistic. But these are my thoughts.

Being in an isolation ward is not an experience I would wish on anyone. I’m allowed visits from two people at a time (besides the gaggle of doctors and the constant stream of nurses), always in masks. In some ways it’s a completely alien, un-comforting, un-nurturing, exposing experience. But in other ways, it’s not so different from the outside world – at least the one we’ve accepted. The world that’s been constructed, the neoliberal world, is one that isolates each of us more and more as it entrenches itself. It isolates each of us by forcing us to focus on individual achievement and accumulation. It encourages us to “optimise” ourselves and gives us customised social media feeds.

This world has been constructed, deliberately, to break down forms of community, through union-busting, gentrification that privatises public spaces, and a culture that lauds the individual “hero” through news stories and movies. Each of us, in many ways, is stuck in our own isolation wards.

This hasn’t come about by accident. There are many power structures at the root of all of our current problems, which have a vested interest in – and that put considerable resources towards – maintaining the structure. These include: politicians, CEOs, corporations, patriarchy, whiteness, colonialism, nationalism, Zionism, organised religion, class systems and wealth. (I fit into a few of those power structures and as a result I feel a responsibility to interrogate my own actions and motives, and be open to better understanding the needs of those who have less power than me.)

These power structures often “other” us and do their best to keep themselves far removed from us. Some are seemingly untouchable. Some are ordinary folks just getting by, but that doesn’t stop their lives having an impact on those below them in the power hierarchy (like the exploited, sometimes enslaved, labour making the cheap electronics and clothing we buy). And the truly powerful wipe out jobs and destroy the planet, while flaunting their wealth like villains from a James Bond movie.

Perhaps it’s because this power is so difficult to topple that the rest of us tend to blame and attack the easiest, most vulnerable targets: the poor, the foreigner, the LGBTQ+, the jobless, the homeless, the disabled, the sick, and anyone who doesn’t conform to current society’s ideals of success and normality. We accuse them of taking our jobs, destroying family values, corrupting our children and more. We create bizarre conspiracy fantasies to explain away atrocities when the real conspiracies are going on right in front of our eyes.

We allow the powerful to measure our human worth in dollars and productive work output. And they fool us into believing that it’s our own fault for not coping, for being ill or poor. Being homeless becomes a crime; when we talk about illegal immigrants, just being human becomes the crime.

I’m so tired of this world we’ve made. But as David Graeber, the late anthropologist, once wrote: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

For my own part, I feel it’s time to try to make another world. Even if I make no impact whatsoever, at least I can say I tried. One thing is for sure, though – I can’t do it alone. I’m getting out of the isolation ward – the real one (soon) and the one that power structures have created around me. I am going to join organisations that are already out there protesting, calling for boycotts, pointing out atrocities and trying to build a kinder, gentler planet for everyone. I hope to see you there. DM