It’s war and COVID19 is just the tip of the iceberg

We all kind of get it that we’re in a global warzone.  Viruses are extremely hard to predict when you’ve lost control of them.  This is why all the experts are behaving as ‘alarmists’.

We, all of us, are on a journey.  Some began that journey earlier and are experiencing now what we will experience, and others are set to experience what we are now experiencing.  Had we been told two or three months ago that we’d be facing a global catastrophe right now we’d have scoffed at that ‘doomsday’ thought.  But that is our reality right now.

If only it were a medical emergency.  But, no, it is an economic emergency.  It is also a social emergency.  Not only do millions stand to needlessly perish from this virus, the modernised world stands at the door of fiscal collapse, and societal unrest unto anarchy are real possibilities from here.

Let’s tackle the last one first.  The social unrest.

Everyone is grieving.  Everyone is anxious.  The family is being tested like it never has been before. Parents, if they still have their jobs, are working from home and schooling their children and being a parent into the mix.  There is no respite, whatsoever.  And, for the dignity of persons who are now destitute, I won’t harm them by venturing to say anything else here.  They have my prayers.

There will always be stories promoted of how families pulled together and prospered during such a time as this, but they’ll be in the rare minority believe me — fit only for social media consumption of the societal set who cannot bear bad news.

I’ve done enough marriage counselling to know the reality of life in marriage and family — it’s like a box of chocolates, as Forest Gump once said.  I know the dynamics of family and marriage in my own life, it’s not easy and especially in this day it’s harder than ever.  This crisis is all it takes for marginal marriages to end, and for those at the end to spill over into violence (even if a few marriages thrive against the odds — which we can all applaud).  There will be more domestic violence and child abuse than ever before.

There are bonds of cohesion we will all need to work with if we’re to pull through this, and there will be whole communities that will descend into anarchy, and martial law will be necessary to bring a semblance of control.  The possibilities are truly scary.

Let me issue this refrain — I don’t write this to scare but to awaken the sleeper, to raise the ambivalent to awareness, and yet a good many of those will never care.  We will all pay dearly because of these.  We must grow care into a critical mass.

The economic consequences of this the biggest ongoing event in our modern history, by far, are as far reaching as the mind can conceive — and further.  Think worst case scenarios.  Just look at what measures have been put in place that have continued to shock us on a daily basis.  These measures have their social cost, but the impacts run so much deeper.  This shift leaves the possibility wide open for whole democracies to be at the mercy of despotic tyrannies.  Ask an historian: all empires come to end at some point.

In a short while, massive shifts can develop, which are things we’d not have dared to conceive.  Could it be that we’ve been living in some of the most privileged of times and we’re now about to face a time of unimaginable suffering?  I hate even writing those words.  The end of life as we know it, however hard our lives have been.  Now is the time, right now, to pull together, to, as the experts have been telling us, to “pull all the levers.”

I don’t write this to scare but to awaken the sleeper, to raise the ambivalent to awareness, and yet a good many of those will never care.  We will all pay dearly because of these.  We must grow care into a critical mass.

Now to finish.  The medical dimension.  Untold numbers of people are dying.  And not those who are just ‘vulnerable’ — as if that would be something that could make healthy people feel a bit more relaxed.  It will take some of the young.  It will take doctors, nurses, and others in the frontline.  And mainly when the hospital systems are overrun.  We know this. 

But what we don’t realise is we don’t care until it’s close enough to touch us and our lives and where it threatens to take us and our loved ones.  That’s when we sit up and listen more attentively — when it’s too late.  When it’s our loved one who is being intubated and they’re the ones who will 3 people in 10 die.

If this virus runs to worst case estimates and it takes 90 million people globally, we will all know someone who died because of it.  Some of those will actually be our relatives.  This is more people dying in say one year than who died in the six years of World War II.

The impacts of COVID19 are cataclysmic on at least three levels; the medical, the economic, and the social.  It’s war and truly the virus is just the tip of the iceberg, especially in terms of it possibly being the initiator of a domino effect for years and perhaps decades to come.

I don’t write this to scare but to awaken the sleeper, to raise the ambivalent to awareness, and yet a good many of those will never care.  We will all pay dearly because of these.  We must grow care into a critical mass.

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash