We have reached a tipping point.

Lately, anxiety catches me in its high beam and leaves me frozen in fear, like a rabbit sitting on a darkened stretch of roadway terrified by the lights of an approaching car. It is just hard to navigate through a world overwhelmed by Covid; if you don't know where your next paycheque is coming from and you are not in the best of health. I know, I am not alone in this long trudge through a society damaged by Covid. I know there are millions like me experiencing the wrong end of the stick from a political system that favours the few over the many.

Nevertheless, it is still a hard time for me as I have an upcoming CT scan. It will determine whether my rectal cancer has come back or perhaps moved to other organs in my body. It’s been two years since my initial diagnosis of cancer, and although I feel less anxious that cancer will blunt my hopes for old age, I also know my odds for recurrence would make a casino edgy if they were about the likelihood of a gambler winning big at the blackjack table.

Scanxiety isn’t unique to me. Most people who need regular check-ups to monitor their progress against a life-threatening disease dread these moments of reckoning. It triggers trauma. It reminds us of the hard voyage we underwent to survive our afflictions. It reminds us how close to the razor’s edge we are to nonexistence. I believe covid restrictions and mask-wearing does something similar to many people which is why they don't like those prohibitions and resist them. Public health measures used to control the spread of Covid scratch our consciousness sharply. Seeing masks on people's faces says to us, "you are flesh and blood and one day, you will be dead."

I am worn down by Covid and my isolation from society. My dread now extends beyond fear for my mortality to general uncertainty about society’s ability to survive both the corruption of our political class and a news media neutered by corporate control and the self-interest of well-paid pundits. The world isn’t stumbling to its destruction but running to embrace it.

Countries like the US, UK, and even Canada are less tolerant, less altruistic now than before Covid which is why you don’t see a Marshall Plan to vaccinate everyone in the developing world against the virus. Our governments don’t want to spend the money and destabilise capitalism by suspending patents on life-saving vaccines to prevent mass death. I guess the reasoning is if American citizens can stomach 800k of their own dying needlessly from Covid, they can stomach millions dying offshore from it.

Too many, on social media, claim they want to return to pre-pandemic normalcy. But the problem is they can't define what that normal was or should be now, except that it should contain no masks and the right to enjoy a salad bar at an all you can eat buffet.

But the thing is, normal in a society where the many labour for the whims of the few always means your energies are expended to enrich the entitled. That is why no political party that has a hope of forming a government has put forth a bold vision, for the future. Instead, it’s a fight between who is more competent to keep a ticking time bomb ticking rather than defusing it.

Unlike the Second World War where Britain’s coalition government was willing to put all its nation’s chips on the table to defeat Hitler, neither the Tories nor Labour have suggested the same remedy to expunge ourselves of Covid. It is no different in the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia or anywhere in the world. All governments fear a fair and equal society more than a plague. You see, a plague just kills people that are easily replaceable cogs in the wheels of an economy owned by billionaires. But rewiring a society where all enjoy the fruits of prosperity would destroy the wealth accumulation of the 1%. This would end a power dynamic that, in Europe at least, spent the last thousand years evolving and perfecting itself.

2022 is humanity's watershed year and no one can predict how it will unfurl. But it is not soothsaying to admit that, at this moment, there are so many tipping points to doom and so few to salvation. My money is on the cost of the living crisis to push us over the edge. With inflation on the rise and jobs that pay destitute wages- food, housing, everyday necessities become out of reach. This cost of living crisis is gathering speed, and if not stopped will spread with the same urgency as Covid to every class but the 1%. The whole edifice of society is at a moment in history where it can become unhinged, like 1789 in France, 1917 in Russia or 1933 in Germany. And as a man well past middle-aged but still far from the cloak of decrepitude, I am not looking forward to seeing how this turns out.