For all of the incredulous things that have been happening recently, we could all be characters on a giant movie set. Entire countries stilled as if some ethereal hand had just reached out and pressed pause. Except that it is all so real. Those who have died have not just been written out of the plot; those who are seriously ill, really are fighting for their lives. And the millions made poorer by the overriding need to quell the coronavirus pandemic will struggle supremely in the months ahead as the economic slump settles in.
Unprecedented and unpredictable are two of the adjectives that have been in constant rotation since Covid-19 slam-dunked the world. We may tire of hearing them and using them but in truth, despite the world having experienced pandemics before, there were none that were this virulent, this easily spread, so unprecedented fits.
What is not predictable is where, what and how ‘normal’ will be at the end of it. There have been predictions and suppositions, but no one knows for sure yet when the world will be able to say that it has effectively beat back this novel coronavirus. And all of the economic pundits forecasting what our lives will be like going forward are also playing the guessing game. Given the mix involved, humans and an unknown viral infection, it is nothing short of unpredictable.
For those of us given to introspection, the things we have come to realise are what should inform our thinking going forward. But again, there are no guarantees that this will happen. Too many of us have conveniently short memories. However, there will be changes and we would all do well to prepare for them.
Firstly, the economic depression mentioned above is going to happen for almost all of us regardless of where we live, except perhaps if we live in China which at the moment is a tiger gathering its strength to claw its way to economic world domination. Not that there is anything in its way.
The global economy is, unsurprisingly, very fragile. It took just weeks of the lockdown, which incidentally should be viewed as a time to refresh, renew, and recharge, for things to begin to look really bad everywhere. The world used to look to the US for leadership, but its illusion as the world’s superpower quickly lost its glimmer. In fact, the US has made too many flubs, particularly over the last six months, to recover the ground it increasingly lost starting just under four years ago. Its handling of Covid-19 to date perhaps being the most spectacular.
Secondly, Robert Browning’s admonition to Lucrezia in his 1855 poem Andrea del Sarto, “…less is more…,” is truly sage advice, applicable in numerous situations, but obviously appropriate for these times. Decades of greed supplanting need have led to overproduction, overconsumption, and waste. This has been hard on the planet. Particularly the waste.
But even with the heartbreaking evidence of this all around us, we chose the axiom of the bigger, the better. Take the example of a factory producing over one million smartphones a month to cater to people induced to constantly discard these instruments in order to possess the newer model. Yet, those who worked in this factory could barely afford to feed their families. And we called this progress.
Not that there is anything wrong with producing smartphones or any other instrument through which we funnel modern technology; we have seen their usefulness in these bleak times. But surely we must now be aware that a new model every six to nine months is excessive, particularly when in that same period we have not figured out more important things like how to feed more of the world’s hungry, or reduce the amount of plastic choking our bodies of water, for example.
Those who have managed to tune out the hype over the weeks of enforced seclusion, would have come to the realisation that for the most part our approach to life is wrong. A great economy is not made by producing more and selling more, but by not exceeding our needs. It is about having strong essential services and being able to ride out a crisis. It is about ensuring that the poorest among us are paid a living wage so that they can take care of their families, thrive and save thus enabling them to better weather storms in the future. It is about protecting our population against future pandemics by strengthening our health systems, establishing and maintaining national public health response plans, monitoring disease outbreaks and ensuring that we activate those plans early enough to prevent the spread and devastating impact on our people and economies. What we require most are more thoughtful leadership and a different mindset if we are to have a better future or in fact any future at all.
