July 25, 2021, by Brigitte Nerlich
Covid, cowering and cowardice
We all remember Boris Johnson saying in March 2020 that we should take covid on the chin, followed by him saying in April that year that Covid was an invisible mugger that one should wrestle to the floor.
This metaphorical framing of the virus as a physical assailant and of those having to deal with the virus as bravely fighting back, has now been reinforced by our new health secretary Sajid Javid, who had recovered from Covid, saying that one shouldn’t cower from the virus. His intention was to persuade more people get the vaccine, but words matter. What he actually did by using the word ‘cower’ was insult all those who, unlike him, have died from the virus and those living in fear of this happening to them because they are, for example, immunosuppressed. (Just after writing this. it was reported that Javid has apologised for his remarks, but still…)
What does ‘cower’ mean and what other meanings are associated with this word? The etymology is quite hazy, but as the Oxford English Dictionary says, the word is “perhaps of Norse derivation: compare Icelandic kúra to sleep, doze, Swedish kura, Danish kure, to squat; also modern German kauern to cower, of which the antecedents are unknown.” It nowadays means “To stand or squat in a bent position; to bend with the knees and back; to crouch, esp. for shelter, from danger, or in timidity.”
The word cower therefore evokes the concepts of coward and cowardice (which have quite a different etymology). The meaning of ‘coward’ is defined as “A reproachful designation for one who displays ignoble fear or want of courage in the face of danger, pain, or difficulty; an ignobly faint-hearted or pusillanimous person.”
As one tweeter said: “So, after all this time, it turns out that the key to avoid dying from Covid-19 was just to be really, really brave”. And, as quoted in a Guardian article, “Jo Goodman, the co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said Javid’s ‘comments are deeply insensitive on a number of levels’. ‘Not only are they hurtful to bereaved families, implying our loved ones were too cowardly to fight the virus, but they insult all those still doing their best to protect others from the devastation this horrific virus can bring,’ she said.” Cancer patients will know how this feels!
Javid’s remark reminded me of some comments made by Donald Trump after he recovered from Covid, “telling Americans, ‘Don’t be afraid of it,’ and saying that he felt ‘better than 20 years ago.’”
So, does this mean that being afraid of Covid and cowering away from it is a bad thing? I think not. Even with two vaccinations, break-through infections are more common than we thought and caution is still called for. The first rule when faced with a contagious disease is: try not to catch it! Is that cowering?
I can’t say it better than Larry, the Number 10 cat: “Javid thinks this makes him look strong, but it reveals that he is weak. People haven’t cowered; they have done their best to look after themselves and each other, which the government has repeatedly failed to do at the cost of 129,000 lives.”
When framing the handling of a pandemic as hand-to-hand combat, individual action and responsibility are foregrounded and government action and responsibility are backgrounded. If you frame pandemic management as ‘taking it on the chin’, ‘as wrestling somebody to the floor’, or as ‘not cowering away’, you hide the fact that pandemic management needs patient, collective and coordinated action at a large scale by a responsible government.
Image: Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/photos/arm-wrestling-bet-monochrome-sport-567950/
A perfect response to Javid’s insenitive stupidity. Thank you
No what he has done by apologising is to play up to the cheap seats who knew exactly what he meant by cowering from the virus and chose to deliberately take what he said out of all contest because they are bigots and racists.
He was right, this cowardice need to stop. He should never have apologised.
You must however take into account that fear, which is pushed by the mainstream media and governments everywhere, is detrimental to your immune system. There are plenty of studies about this, long before corona. I blogged about this already last April: https://www.artofthemystic.com/blog/stress-weakens-the-immune-system
Being cautious in the face of an infectious disease is not necessarily living in fear.
Of course being cautious is a given, but it is fear that is being pushed to extremes by the governments and the mainstream (and often subsidized) media, even doing so by showing fake photos (last spring) of piles of coffins in Bergamo, Italy, for example, as if reality wasn’t bad enough. To what purpose?
I know many people personally that live in fear because of the media, and many more that write to the papers and on social media about their fears that had been induced by the relentless media attack.
Add to this the “expert” prognosticators and their forecasts of gloom and doom (in my country Austria, they talked about soon 100.000 dead last Spring – to this day the number is just over 10.000, which may well include cancer patients that happened to be positiv tested for Covid-19).
All of this is unprecedented. I am old enough to have lived through several pandemics (I lived for decades in Canada) but at no time ever before was it blown up to be such an issue as now.
If you are interested, this is our dashboard for Austria: https://covid19-dashboard.ages.at/dashboard.html