This is a bit late as an anniversary but I felt it important to write something about the horrific lockdowns in Shanghai during early 2022. It’s the first anniversary of just one of many human rights abuses that crushed the human spirit during lockdowns across the globe beginning in 2020. The video footage of Shanghai residents screaming from their balconies—who were literally locked into their high rise apartments for weeks on end—is surely the most eerie, haunting image of the entire Covid debacle. What we don’t know is how many Chinese suicides these lockdowns caused, nor how much spousal and child abuse erupted under the pressure cooker of this human-rat-in-a-cage experiment. Whatever our opinions may be of the Chinese Communist Party’s totalitarian regime, these are humans like the rest of us and they deserve our compassion. Not the fake, weaponized compassion of “get your shot to protect the collective,” but genuine empathy, that quality so clearly lacking in the sociopathic military, government and media elites who pushed this deadly program on innocent people the world over.
The Screaming Towers
“When I think of a wise man, his merits appear to be like jade.”—Confucius, Book of OdesNo caged tiger remains a tiger.[1]Pace, pace, pace—it hauntsthe narrow borders of its cellwhere nothing green grows,the sun’s shadowplay an urgentmemory, reduced to the blue flickerof screens spewing the bile of fear.And what beast screws shutthe doors of twenty-storey prisons,leaves food rotting in warehouseswhile day by day the screamingcontinues? Inside lockdown,this is no thirty-second soundbite.Innocent banshees crowd the balconies,a hellish choir whose voices clawat their cages, shred the neon nightbegging for mercy, mercy,the milk of human kindness gone sour.This Middle Kingdom whose Maoist kingsare already the walking dead,who traded hearts of jadefor hearts of lead, who pillagedfive thousand years of glory, artand poetry for the illusion of total controlover every human soul. The chorusof screaming towers the surest sign—this animal has a spirit that cries outnight and day ’til it walks free again.©2023 Sean Arthur Joyce
[1] Ironically, 2022 when this lockdown occurred in Shanghai was the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese calendar. The late Canadian professor of environmental studies John Livingston said something similar about a caged animal separated from its environment.