A time of reckoning

DID IT REALLY take covid19 for us to understand how greedy and backward the world has been? Somehow in our warped way of thinking we felt it was right to fill stadiums with tens of thousands of people to watch sporting events. We thought it was right to have people sitting in their cars for four hours waiting to get home in the evening after leaving home at 4 am to get to work on time for 8 am.

We made ourselves into zombies and it took a bat and a coronavirus to show us the errors of our ways. I know there are all kinds of conspiracy theories surfacing about the origins of covid19, but I’m sticking with the bat in the Wuhan market because I believe, as the famous primatologist Jane Goodall said, we are in this mess because we disrespected animals and nature. Hopefully we aren’t too ignorant to correct our ways.

The Government has begun slowly lifting the stay-at-home order. Gradually, we will venture outside more and more. We will return to the world that we tried our best to destroy, and it is our choice if we try to return to the error of our ways or come up with creative solutions to the problems we created that are destroying us.

The fear we have experienced should be our guide for the future. We should realise now we have to stop and take stock about what is really important in this life. It’s not more money or more material things. We should have learned the power of introspection. We need to think more about our actions and about creating a more just and equitable society. This is our chance to close the gap between rich and poor. We have to admit our mistakes.

It took covid19 to teach us how backward we have been about our education system. How in the world did we ever think it was right to stuff more than 30 children in a classroom? We left students behind. We didn’t lead them into the world of technology. We created the most dysfunctional conditions possible for students to learn. We made them sit in hours of traffic to and from school so that they would always feel tired and frustrated.

We robbed them of their lives because after long hours at school they had to pay for extra lessons or do hours of homework. How would we feel after our long, gruelling days at work if we were told we had to work an additional four hours at home or pay someone to teach us what we should have learned at work?

We have been unfair to ourselves, to our children and to this world, and we were moving so fast and so out of touch with what is right that we didn’t even notice the errors of our way.

This covid19 episode has been a wakeup call. Spillover diseases from the animal world to humans is not going away. Covid19 is going to be with us for a while. As scientists keep saying, we have to adapt to it. It’s not going to adapt to us. How many people who knew about the Spanish flu of 1918 thought such a catastrophe could never happen again? We were so smug in our technological world.

Moving forward, we should be scared, and we should be humble. We are not invincible. We are not above anyone around us. We can all be brought to our knees – not just by this virus but by anything Mother Nature wants to throw at us to teach us a lesson. We have encroached on the natural habitats of animals and ruined this earth all for our own selfish gains. We have not understood the meaning of the word respect, and for that we are paying a very high price.

Now is the time of reckoning for all those misdeeds. Those who ignored the problems we have created are just as culpable as those who have purposely destroyed the environment. Every time we wiped out a species we upset the balance of nature. We should never strive to return to the lives we lived just a couple of months ago. We need to be held accountable for the wrong we do. It’s high time we learn to respect each other and understand that the world’s problems are our problems as well. Covid19 certainly has proved this.