We are, at this juncture, nowhere close to a ‘serum’ that will banish the spectre of coronavirus from our midst. But it is not just a question of finding a medical cure for the malady; by now, it must have dawned on us as a human community that much of the pandemic’s potency reposes in its psychological venom, its propensity for ‘playing games’ that feast on fertile minds seized with the conviction that the virus is unerringly steering us into the realm of what we now describe as the ‘new normal.’
If we can hardly afford to have our thinking wander too far away from the matter of a cure for the virus, much is, even now, being said and written about the impact of COVID-19 on mindsets and on how it is driving behavioural change. With the advent of the virus we are being nudged inexorably in the direction of questioning the way we live, the ‘old normal,’ if you will. We may even have begun to jettison old axioms and to fashion new ones against the background of what is still our limited understanding of COVID-19. Thinking and action have been, with the advent of COVID-19, dragged increasingly outside the box by a force, in the presence of which, we have, as a global human community been profoundly sobered, humbled, if you will.
Here in Guyana, for example, the accustomed predictability of education delivery has been scattered to the winds by the sheer force of the virus. Conventional classroom tuition has had to be hastily set aside in deference to a sudden naked fear that we were, suddenly, perched on the edge of possible catastrophe. As the first term of a new school year approaches our understandably out-of-their-depth education administrators are showing signs of being at ‘sixes and sevens’ trying to put the system back together again.
And how do we go about calculating what has already been lost to the nation in terms of education delivery and whether we can, in the immediate future, recover from that loss.
Similar kinds of exacting challenges are located in other critical spheres of our existence…like the sudden and far from altogether welcome shift to homes being workplaces; prevailing uncertainty regarding the normalization of international air travel, the global uncertainty as to when the all-important practice of people gathering in numbers for myriad important purposes will resume without the risk of blowback from the pandemic and the uncertainties associated with having trade and commerce move to a condition of full resumption, given the risks that might inhere therein.
There may be an enormous element of the unknown in this ‘new normal,’ but a point has almost certainly been reached where we have little choice but to embrace it.
As it is, we find ourselves hastening towards this ‘new normal’ which we will have little choice but to embrace, without even as much as a decent understanding of where it is likely to take us.
The whole circumstance amounts to a global experience that will require decision-making at a rate of speed that leaves perilously little time for the required contemplation. That, as much as anything else, lies at the heart of the ‘area of darkness’ that appears to lie ahead.
If the COVID-19-related loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and the various other physical and emotional disfigurements have been a profound tragedy, the road ahead is almost certainly pock-marked with deeper craters. At this juncture we find ourselves, as a human community, compelled to take a number of critical decisions about the continuity of our existence based, in a number of instances, on sorry little evidence to support the assumptions that are likely to drive those decisions. Perhaps the most profound impact has been that of being pushed into a twilight zone from whence we can only go forward gingerly, groping for the light in a never-ending area of darkness.
