Many Decades Later, My Dream Came Through – But at What Cost?

The comparison is flawed in many ways, of course, though memories resurface.

Where the Basque separatists rebelled against a brutal Spanish dictator, the recent North Norwegian separatism is largely based on medical considerations. Norway has in reality been split in two more or less at the middle. In addition, the Home Guard and the police have been put to work at North Norwegian border crossing stations towards Sweden, Finland and Russia

A blessed rebellion

The fact that this rebellion in addition has received national political blessings, albeit somewhat reluctantly, also goes to weaken the force of the regional rebellion that has shut us off from the rest of the world.

Yet there is an enormous effect.

Not only have we quarantined southerners and shut them out from our region. We have also shut ourselves out from a normal life, if our sense of missing family and friends further south in the country were to grow too strong. Visiting a grandchild south of the invisible border would until Tuesday this week be punished with 14 days of quarantine upon arriving home again.

For most of us, I believe, the price of a hug or a dearly missed child’s hand was simply too high.

Instead we have obediently bowed to the medical and political responsibility imposed on us.

High moral headlines and hateful statements in social media have left an impression of the opposite. Some kids playing football in a field, a group of friends meeting over a glass of something, runners passing others by too close has been enough to cause media headlines.

Aligned with the authorities

You cannot misrepresent the story more, the story of a nation that has gone above and beyond to comply with the authorities’ requirements. Moral fingers have tirelessly sought out those who have not complied every second of every day to how regional and national guidelines tell us to live our lives during a pandemic.

The true story is one about people who, from one hour to the next, have adjusted to nearly inhumane regulations. We have done that in order to protect the vulnerable when the virus is chasing its new victims. We have done so because we, in the choice between opposing or obeying, have chosen the latter. We have allowed political leadership and medical expertise to decide, even in cases where the two groups clearly have differences of opinion.

We have chosen obedience over self-interest, or obedience because we have chosen to believe that that is in our own interest.

Many decades after I found myself in a tent alongside despairing Basques in a tent in Spain, I was nevertheless to find myself as a separatist. In my own home region.

The stranglehold of nationalism

Like everyone else, I have refrained from hugs and from social interaction that is a necessity for living a full life.

I have done so while worrying about how brutal nationalism takes a stranglehold on people with a life organized differently from my own. Wanting to protect a region against infection is something quite different from the State of Emergency laws that politicians without democratic ambition impose on their own people. The ultimate rationale behind a dictatorship ended up being a virus out of control.

I have read about children who beg for help during the absence of the protection that lies in a kindergarten or class at school.

I have almost fainted in despair over countries so poor and ravaged by war that health care services have been abandoned long time ago.

All that remains to be seen

I have watched a president in a country that previously took international responsibility, some sort of international leadership, and seen how isolationist self-absorption has replaced all forms of empathy.

And I have seen a European Union completely void of any ability to organize an international defence against a pandemic that has been a well-known threat for years and years.

With all this in mind, our self-imposed and temporary separatism is something I can live with.

The Arctic and the High North are still blessedly free from the worst ravaging of the corona virus.

Whether or not that lasts, remains to be seen.

As does finding out what the pandemic has imposed on us, humans, in addition to death and suffering.

This commentary was originally published in Norwegian and has been translated by HNN's Elisabeth Bergquist.