Staying at home doesn’t make us heroes

I don’t particularly like the constant war analogies used about fighting coronavirus. However, when someone like Matt Hancock conjures up the Blitz spirit, urging us to pull together ‘in one gigantic national effort’, I think of that cliched question: ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ Forget the sexism, what will our answer be to future generations? The fact is that millions of us will have to reply: ‘I did nothing, I stayed at home.’ That raises a real dilemma of lockdown society: are we being socialised into concluding that passivity is a positive virtue? 

In the 1915 war recruitment poster ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’, designed to shame people to enlist, a daughter poses the question to her father sitting in an armchair, while her brother plays with toy soldiers. The propaganda may have been crudely guilt-inducing, but historically heroes don’t earn plaudits for sitting out any call to arms on the sofa.