Sitting here twiddling my thumbs during a three day Covid lockdown in Brisbane, Australia, a city and country both blessed with good Covid management and low infection figures, I think about the past and the challenges humanity has suffered, both self inflicted and those inflicted by nature.
2020 has, for those who have survived, or not caught Covid, been tiresome to say the least but how bad is tiresome compared to what the human race has already survived?
I am sixty-eight years of age. That may seem old to some of you, but it isn't. In today's world it is probably safe to say that it's just past middle age. I lost my job to Covid ten months ago and I was healthy and going strong. I thought, and still hope, to live into my eighties but now there is a large question mark hovering over me. How long will this pandemic last and will I be able to avoid it? For someone of my generation born into a world without global war, with penicillin and all the amenities I could desire, that's hard to accept and I'm trying to come to terms with it.
There are conspiracy theorists at large who don't believe in the virus and I know some of them. I have a suspicion they hold this belief because, living in a world where most diseases are controllable and where wars occur in far off third world countries, they just don't believe this pandemic can be so potent that it has governments scared. Many also believe it is a conspiracy by an elite, global and powerful few who wish to control the population of the planet by using a non-existent virus to fool them into behaving according to their wishes. Hitler thought he could control the population and that his Reich would last a thousand years and it barely lasted twenty. Good luck to anybody who tries the same because you just can't control hundreds of billions of people even if seventy percent or so have have an only average IQ. People, thankfully, have this tendency to rebel. It may lead to wars but you have to overthrow despots.
I am far more afraid of a teensy-weensy virus than I am of some global plot. There is honour in fighting for what you believe in but none in fighting a virus. It holds no beliefs, it doesn't see your sacrifice, it just wants to replicate in you. To me that is an ignominious way to die and, even if it doesn't kill you, it can leave you extremely debilitated.
It's been a hundred years since the last global pandemic and, in between, there have been two world wars. There's also been a myriad of other things going on but after all that time, after all the technological and medical advances the human race has achieved, we didn't honestly believe a mere virus could get us.
I sometimes lie awake these nights wondering if I've stepped into an alternate reality and this isn't really happening. Now I've always thought of myself as a realist but even I feel like Alice who has stepped behind the looking glass. It's so weird to think our world has been stopped in its tracks by this invisible threat that travels amongst us in our friends, people on the street, surfaces, everywhere.
Throughout world history people have accepted, until approximately, one hundred years ago, that they could lose family, young children and friends to disease. Women died in childbirth, their children died of Scarlet Fever or any number of other complaints. Disease was an accepted, if unwelcome, part of life. Ether and anesthetics also made it possible to save people because surgery became possible,
For almost one hundred years the human race, at least in non third world countries, has been feeling pretty secure when it comes to viruses and although cancer and some other diseases have not been defeated, many advances have been made to prolong life and also cure people.
The last nasty virus to rear its ugly little head was HIV in the eighties, or thereabouts, but incredible advances have also been made to subdue it. The Covid-19 virus is, however, a real wake up call. Basically we've been thrown back in time a hundred years. Our confidence has been shattered and, for the first time in decades, we don't know what's coming next.
This made it interesting to watch the enthusiasm around the 2021 New Year celebrations, what there were of them, as if we could leave 2020 and the virus behind us. I really don't think so. Even if a vaccine can halt its progress, a lot more damage has been done than just to our physical health. We have all suffered a mental setback of some significance. I also look at my grand-children and wonder how the memory of what has happened, from the reactions of adults close to them, to the home schooling, to having to take precautions and the concern they sense from those around them, including the media, will affect them.
Some will come through unscathed but the memory will remain and, hopefully, it will make them tougher and better prepared than we adults have been this time around. I remember being a highly strung child and every night thought I would hear on the news that the world would end tomorrow. I'm not kidding but here I still am. Happily my grand-children seem more grounded than I was but I hope this extraordinary time will not leave them traumatized. We may survive it but it would be nice to move forward with our heads firmly on our shoulders and with hope rather than to wait for the next disaster that awaits us.
I try now to look back to past generations for some inspiration and backbone, to those who survived world wars, pestilence and uncertainty. There was even the Cuban Missile affair that had the world on the verge of nuclear war that would have probably meant the end of the human race. We've come this far so let's hope we can go further while not doing too much more damage to our planet. I can't help feeling in all of this that it's trying to tell us something.
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