Okay, before I get lynched, let me say one thing – this whole experience with COVID-19 has been horrifying, stressful and grief-stricken. The entire human race has been served notice that we are not nearly as powerful and untouchable as we’d like to think. Any disease is scary and potentially deadly – and even one life lost to this heartless killer is one too many.
That being said – we had plenty of advance warning that this was likely to happen. We have been told for years that a pandemic was not really a question of ‘if’, but a question of ‘when’. The fact that we ignored the warnings and went blithely about our business says more about our racial hubris, and not much bad at all about the medical experts that tried to warn us. However, as pandemics go, we have gotten off remarkably easily. Again, those who have lost friends and loved ones to this disease are understandably skeptical, I’m sure. But consider that Ebola has a roughly 50% kill rate, and the only reason that Coronavirus doesn’t has to be chalked up to – well, let’s call it great good fortune. If we are smart, we will learn from this tragedy – so that the next pandemic, and yes there will be a next one, will not catch us unprepared like this one has. But there is a great deal more to it than that, isn’t there?
2020 will go down in history as many things: the Lockdown year, the COVID year, the Year of Social Distancing. But more than anything else, it was the Year of Change. Because Hollywood was on hiatus, because the sports franchises were on suspension, the normal level of noise and distraction was at an absolute minimum. Social problems were suddenly and loudly brought center stage, long-standing issues got the coverage and airtime they’ve desperately needed for years. Education has been revealed as the broken and useless machine it has been for the best part of a century. Our political systems have been shown to be hollow and ineffective. The economy has not reacted at all as it was predicted to do. We stand on the brink of massive change on many fronts – our entire society will go through this restructuring. The reaction of many will be to desperately try to return to ‘normal’, to pull the torn and stained blankets of a broken paradigm around themselves and attempt to ‘get back to the good’. But that way lies madness. We can never return to what was. And we shouldn’t want to.
Western civilization has been in a steep decline since before World War II. The Industrial Revolution did a very efficient job of wrecking the planet, and the children and grandchildren of the Robber Barons have been gleefully going about finishing the job. Our food does not nourish us, our art does not enlighten us and the very air we breathe is poisonous. But for years now, we have pushed these problems off from generation to generation, always too busy to fix things, always too mesmerized to see the truth. Well, we have been given a gift – we have been locked down, forced to find ways to entertain ourselves, required to teach our own children. And we have discovered something – we can do this. We can fix the problems, change the systems and find our own way through the confusion. Many will still panic and flutter needlessly and break out into the toxic wilderness to falter and die. We cannot help them. We have a world to rebuild.
And rebuild it we shall. But we must rebuild it more rationally, more humanely than the systems of the past. We must come to understand that education is about learning, about fostering curiosity and creativity, not about test scores. We must see the function of government as doing the most good for the greatest number of people, while protecting the rights of the minority, rather than the opposite. We must come to understand that economics is not about companies or banks or Wall Street – economics is people. But more than that, it is time for the human race to mature – to grow up. We are about to step out onto a much larger stage, with distances measured in light-years rather than statute miles. We must fix the home planet, using lessons we will learn by trying to terraform another. And we must learn to be tough, versatile and adaptable. Because if we ever do meet another sentient race out there, that shock will make 2020 look like a week in kindergarten.
Good journey,
TGC