UPDATE: I wrote this weeks ago – when it was the start of a whole new era – but it’s still worth a read.
I said the other day that COVID – 19 has already changed the world fundamentally and dramatically. We say goodbye to people we deal with every week due to quarantine and lockdown and never know if we’ll see them again. We watch the world regenerate around us as if we hadn’t been there, and that makes us think (those of us that DO think, that is) of how we let it get as far as this.
I’m nearly clear across the country from my litte sisters, across two quarantined borders. If anything happened to any of them I couldn’t even get to the funeral. That’s hard, it’s made each of us into pandemic refugees wherever we are. That’ll stick in one’s psyche …
And for the more vulnerable among us (like myself) there’s the self – monitoring of symptoms. Is that my usual COPD chronic bronchitis cough or COVID – 19? You act invincible for the partner’s sake, but sometimes you find yourself at some kind of depression inflection point because it’s not even halfway through the pandemic at four months and there’s still four months at least, it’s a bit soul – crushing… You get wildly different scenarios going in your head, either you’re gonna crush it or – it’ll crush you. That also sticks in your psyche.
Thanks to the Internet we can see how quickly nature takes the niches back. That gives us a bit of perspective on what we’re doing to the world. And hopefully some determination not to do it again. We may see a lot of ICEVs ditched for EVs, because the latest studies I’ve come across say that even with the cost to the environment of ditching and scrapping the old vehicles and making the new ones and running them over their lifespans, EVs are going to run rings around buying another and operating ICEV in every way, particularly environmentally. One can but hope, hey?
With the amounts of money governments are suddenly able to pull out of their collective convict’s purses, people are going to wonder WHY those governments stole so much money from us, treated us so cruelly. There may be a bi of corrosion at the base of the pedestal capitalism’s been placed upon. One can but hope, hey?
And I still can’t imagine what’ll come out of this. I want to believe that people are going to come out the other side of this and be less self centred and less bastards, but then I also see people pretty much kicking everyone else to the kerb over things like toilet paper and hand sanitiser, I see the government giving cronyist contracts, banks are not going to suspend their money-grubbing ways for an instant, and hucksters are selling useless solutions at panacea prices. But I can hope…
Also imagine if the lockdowns have to continue for longer than just a few more months, and then one day people are free to go out and mingle again. I can just see them going outside and realising there are OTHERS around, in great quantity – and I wonder how long before we break the habit of distancing?
Worse, this pandemic brings one other thought – what if bushfires, droughts, floods, and pandemics is the new normal? We’d be silly not to expect it, hey?
As I write this, I’m sitting up from 6AM so I can get to the shops for the 7AM seniors and at risk opening times at Coles and Woolies, in the hope of snaffling toilet paper and hand sanitiser plus some flour and sugar.
I’m painfully aware that my father and mother had this kind of scarcity in their lives after WWII, but I’m also painfully aware that they were in their teens and tweens when it happened to them while I’m a sextagenarian. I’m tired of this shit, I’m too old for this shit, and this shit – shits me.
If we come out of the COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus pandemic and things don’t get back to normal pretty quickly I don’t know if I want to live in that kind of a world …
Look – I’m kidding. Of course I’d keep on doing it, because I have a wife and between us we have cats and relatives to worry about. Also, I want to see a Brave New World emerge, I want to make my dream of getting a whole programming effort behind AGOCADA come true and I want to see it form the precursor to a new political system that is just run by the people and is not subject to economies and capitalism and is neither conservative nor liberal but instead just IS.