Year 2020 will be remembered for, above all else, COVID-19 and more particularity for its global character. In the immortal words of the late Muhammad Ali, the most iconic figure ever in the sport of boxing, the pandemic “shook up the world.”
Setting aside its global impact, its tally in victims, dead and afflicted, COVID-19 has triggered universal responses that match in their profundity anything that we have witnessed in several generations. Setting aside the range of protocols erected to imprison us behind unaccustomed patterns of defensive behaviour – like social distancing on a hitherto unprecedented scale – the pandemic has triggered amongst large numbers, the world over, a siege mentality, sufficiently uncompromising in its routinized regime to have completely altered the patterns of their existence, At one extreme the skeptics (and there are more of them than in Guyana and across the world than we might think) have dismissed COVID-19 as a humongous hoax, never mind the difficulty that they face in pushing back the reality and the impact of its manifestations. Simultaneously, the pandemic has gifted ‘believers’ one of those heaven-sent opportunities to double down on the ‘God-is-in-charge’ refrain. That has made COVID-19 the latest in a succession of ‘end times’ weapons that materialize from time to time to, simultaneously, rally the faithful and to smite ‘unbelievers’ whose lives are fashioned around the ‘we run things’ doctrine.
COVID-19 is not, as we, in our condition of shock and awe, might be inclined to think, harbingers of an imminent Armageddon, It is an object lesson in the reality that human civilization, its pecking order and power bases, notwithstanding, are hostages to a fortune that we can neither accurately predict nor effectively deflect. In a sense, COVID-19 is a profound learning curve, one of those interventions intended, it seems, to rearrange our altogether inadequate understanding of the ‘bottom line’ insofar as ‘how the world works’ is concerned.
The question that arises is whether the full toll that COVID-19 will eventually take reposes in the final tally in lost lives and otherwise affected ones or whether the real damage will not, down the road, manifest itself in the great gouges that the prevailing pandemic will leave in the fabric of our hitherto accustomed way of life…like our economies and our education systems, tools that have become critical to our very survival and which, in some instances, are devastatingly disfigured. There is already manifest evidence that the dislocation, in many instances, has been sufficiently profound as not to allow for easy rearrangement, at least not for the foreseeable future. Nor will it be any easier for us to find remedies for the resulting deeply harmful and long-term, social upheaval that would have come in its wake and which will doubtless remain behind.
For countries like Guyana, education and the country’s attendant development, or otherwise, are compelling issues, perhaps the most disturbing thing being that such assurances as are being proffered cannot gainsay the glaring imponderables. Truth be told, we are nowhere, not even remotely so, in a position to determine where this will take us.
This, one hastens to add, is not a matter of trotting out a succession of dark scenarios. Rather, it is a matter of taking as candid a look as possible at what may lie ‘out there’ (which is what we, as humans, when we arrive at those critical junctures in our existence are usually inclined to do) in an attempt to trigger a wider, hopefully rational contemplation on just where we are headed whilst, simultaneously, doing what, frankly, is the best that we can…hoping for the best.
Who knows, for example, whether our collective contemplation may not have deposited us at a point where setting time frames for an end to COVID-19 are being supplanted by a kind of holding on to the notion that COVID-19 is simply an elaborate hoax; or might there not be, on the other hand, those who hold the view that the rumoured mutation of the beast now puts the possibility of remedy out of reach, at least in the short term.
Or could it be that there is a ‘comfort zone’ that reposes in reflection on the history of terrible maladies, one in which we will find that the various devastating plagues have taken their respective considerable tolls but yet, we are still here and have even managed to move on. So that might we not, through these macabre precedents, have been gifted the kind of hope that reposes in the belief that all bad things come to an end?
Or is it that these slivers of optimism, of looking on ‘the bright side,’ are threatened by that vast (and considerably influential) army of ‘end times’ adherents who may drown out the ‘brighter side’ notion with their persistent apocalyptic refrains? To what extent do these help to frame our way of thinking? The permutations are endless.
Almost a year into the coronavirus it is the imponderables that preoccupy us. It is a matter of we, as humans, having grown accustomed to a getting-on-with-our–lives, tend to attach time frames to our tolerance. We do not, by nature, take well to assuming protracted hunkering down postures. The socio- economic consequences, loss of jobs, closure of schools, restrictive impacts of masks and of social distancing and the various other harmful social disruptions, are, in a great many instances, gradually altering dispositions.
This is where enlightened governance comes in. A collective ‘it will pass’ mindset has to be fashioned and people have got to be persuaded to buy into it. Whether, of course, the circumstances can trigger a radical departure from the stumbling block of a divided world and by extension, divided nations, can at this juncture receive nothing better than a we-will-have-to-wait-and-see response. What we have learnt over time, is that, politics, political differences, that is, even in the face of the most perilous threats to those whom it claims to serve, remains anchored to its citadels of self-interest. So that setting the vaccine-generated window of hope that may be beginning to open, leadership, at both the global and national levels becomes a key requisite for our ‘picking’ our way out of this crisis. In the instance of countries, as much as the entire international community, it is a matter of putting our planet and our survival first. Perhaps oddly enough, the matter of whether and when we get out of this may well lie, primarily, in our own hands.
