KEEPING OUR CHINS UP POST 2020.

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.

END

 

2020: THOUGHTS ON A MODERN PLAGUE.

 

20/20 to most of us brings to mind the description of perfect vision.  Well apparently here in Australia, now that we're metric, it's been replaced by 6/6.  I was quite disappointed by this news when I visited the optometrist recently when having my eyes checked but, as the mention of 2020 will, from now on, bring to mind a disaster of global proportions, I'll settle for 6/6.

This year will forever, if it were able, hang its head in ignominy.  Its predecessor, 2019, after which the virus was named because the first infection was recorded then, will not suffer that fate because it was only in 2020 when we all became aware we were in the grip of a pandemic.  2019 is like someone looking the other way as if they were an innocent bystander to a crime rather than the perpetrator and letting the one standing beside it take the blame.  We know you were the culprit 2019, we do, and don't think that just because 2020 has a nice ring to it, we will forget.

Looking back a century to 1919 there was also a global pandemic.  Strangely it was not forever tarred with the brush of ignominy but that's because the four years that preceded it had already dished up such a serve of hideousness and mortality, that it was just the last straw.

This latest pandemic has brought out different reactions in people, ones that I doubt would have occurred in the last one.  It has brought out conspiracy theorists as well as a sense of entitlement; those who feel their rights are being infringed by having to follow government issued edicts to protect everyone, such as the wearing of masks.  These people have been more concerned with their freedoms, their right to chose what to do, than their safety.  It doesn't seem to occur to them that they are destroying the rights of others by breathing their potentially infected vapour onto them.  Perhaps they are redirecting their fear onto something they feel they can handle, such as the government, rather than facing something they cannot, death.

People all have different ways of coping but in a pandemic some of the real danger comes from those who cannot face reality.  For many decades now mankind has eradicated most of the contagious diseases and at least two generations have grown up without Scarlet Fever, Polio, Smallpox and the like.  The idea that a disease will sneak up on them and kill the young and healthy seems to be something out of history.  The sense that there is really nothing out there to worry about has also given rise to the anti-vaxxers and because such people won't immunize their children there is a recurrence of childhood diseases such as Whooping Cough.

Earlier this year my son's Mother in Law asked me if I'd had a vaccine against Pneumonia after I mentioned that I'd had my flu shot and she wanted to know if I'd had the Pneumonia shot as well.  I didn't know one existed but she did and she'd had it.  It simply never occurred to me I would catch Pneumonia.  In fact I thought it was a secondary infection you caught after the flu.  Well I sure wish I had known because, while I was flitting around during the mid-year, shopping in a mask and staying home a lot (I'd lost my job due to lack of customers thanks to Covid anyway), I caught Pneumonia.

I went to my doctor for headache tablets and the receptionist checked my temperature but wouldn't let me inside as it was high.  I had to get a Covid test first and go home and wait for the results before I could go back.  A day later I received the good news that I didn't have Covid but by then I was bedridden.  I didn't worry, it would pass, whatever it was.  Two days later my son came around and called an ambulance.  The hospital X-rayed me and told me I had a nasty case of Pneumonia and there I stayed for one week being pumped full of antibiotics and even anti-virals.

Six weeks later I only just felt human again but there is still the ever present threat of Covid and now my immunity isn't great.  Thank heavens I live in Queensland and the government has protected us in spite of those who think they are immortal or that the economy comes first.  I know the economy is vital but that really won't matter if there are no people left.

Other things have been going on around the world this year but everything pales in the face of the pandemic.  It is almost like a sign directed at our progressed society that we can't fix everything and that we are still merely human.

As for those who think the disease is a conspiracy designed by governments worldwide to bring people under their control, I simply don't believe it.  How could governments worldwide agree on this matter when they can't on anything else?  People think the vaccine has something in it that will either track them or cause them to be a mindless followers or heaven knows what or that it will cause everything to be electronic, such as no more cash only cards, and that we will have no freedoms.  I don't trust governments any more than the next person but I think that this has arisen because people are in denial about not being able to control a disease.  We've come so far after all but what they forget is that we are mortal, biological beings.

I'm just happy to be alive now while once I used to feel confined by not having the money to travel, which now seems a questionable activity at best.  We are far safer in Australia, at least thus far, than overseas.  Europe went through the plague in the Middle Ages and life, well the life of those who didn't die, went on.  The plague re-occurred regularly for a couple of centuries but still mankind prevailed even when there was no relief for those who were dying from it and no understanding about how it was caught.

It is the stupidity and arrogance of those who won't follow common sense rules that will continue to allow this virus to spread as well as those less effective governments who won't take the measures necessary to keep it under control.  Perhaps nature is counting on this stupidity to alleviate the planet of our presence.  We forget that it can take its revenge and the more we foul the earth, the more we will allow bacteria and viruses to flourish in the waste.  I for one, however, would like to live to a ripe old age and see my grandchildren grow up in a sane world.  What a shame there aren't viruses to make people more intelligent and responsible.  We wouldn't need a vaccine for those.

END.