Who are we in this pandemic?
“Events of future history will be of the same nature—or nearly so—as the history of the past, so long as men are men.”— Thucydides
What have we become, after seven months and a few days? We have become virtual citizens of imagined spaces. Our characters are not anymore formed by greeting cards and Biblical quotes but by our ability to respond quickly to any statement we read online.
We are individuals present online as teachers and students, tutors and truth-seekers. We have become also sophisticated liars.
In the isolation, we are, to use the proposition of David Attenborough, re-wilding the world. Or maybe this is an exaggeration. We are replanting our porches, backyards, garage, awnings and living rooms. We have become knowledgeable of leaves and shrubs.
We have become re-sellers of vegetation. What could have brought us into the greening of the surroundings? Is it the desire to go back to nature without facing the prospects of the untamed? Or, is it being relevant without the burden of protecting the environment.
Before the lockdown, we were communities of hugging and embracing persons. The winner of talent shows as well as the losers got hugs. We were ants: in encounters we suck each other’s cheek or face. Meetings were incomplete without the embrace. The wealthy turned kissing into acts of graces in place of sincerity. Then the virus came. Maintaining distance was a solution. In deaths, or near deaths where the human bodies were programmed to touch the physical representation of a man slowly passing on, we were told it was best not to be there beside the journey to eternity, or maybe just to the grave.
Presently, the days of ritual and festive mourning approaches. Presently, we are cautioned not to go to places that memorialize the life of those who died and believed in the after-death. The gates of Hell may be always accommodating to humans but entrances to cemeteries and memorial parks will be closed on those days marked for thinking about death and remembering.
If we are to gaze at graves and reread epitaphs, we shou l d make sure that we are there on regular days, on those slow days when the sun is cool or hot and we do not overthink the shapes of clouds or the early appearance of stars as we offer our prayers to our beloved.
In the absence of allowable open horizon, we go back to where we have become good at: the Internet; in the inescapable technologies that bridge distances we dissect and complicate each day.
Online, our lives are not exactly boring; we sizzle and shine in the Net as we, after some months, have already contoured personalities of who we are to be in the ether. No one is keen about offline. The battling and the coupling, the war and the peace, are curated by two extremes —blatant display of the inner self or a careful maneuvering of a persona, full of mysteries and sacred dispensations.
The isolation makes us fear one thing—that we may never meet again. Many of us have left the cities and are now in our own towns and birthplaces. This is once more the story of our grandparents when the Great War came, when they fled to the most rural of desolation and to mountains or woodlands.
In the first months of the lockdown, the thought to be kind to each other was the credo of the human population. But our nature always wins over Nature. We soon became mean and cruel to each other. Issues are never about issues but about ourselves. Politics interests us but we really are more interested in the human behind the power or those who grab power or those who abuse power and those who benefit from the grabbing and the abusing. The news each day is more than breaking. A young woman loses her child because she is not allowed to be with the hapless infant. Reason: she has a different ideology. You see, even as the virus rages, we are political animals. This young mother is shackled as she looks at the tiny corpse inside the coffin. When her chains are removed, she raises her hand in protest and the many (or the vociferous few) all scream: See!
In a world where inhabitants are falling dead because of infections science has yet to understand, the government is afraid of young women protesting, of the youth not agreeing with the incoherent premises of the adults.
A factotum whose claim to fame is a face that has weathered a beauty pageant, and survived it by reporting of queens who passed away due to lack of sleep and beauty, is declared brain dead without her knowing it. A woman senator consistently blames farmers for being dumb to her bright ideas about farmlands being converted to homes and we wonder why beings like her continue to exist above the ground. The mother of education smiles through an ongoing plague of poor teachers printing modules, many using their own money to secure papers in A- 4 sizes, and getting blamed for the contents that are misinterpreted because of wrong data and blurred due to bad copying machines. The top health official proves to be not on top of things but stays on as the country sinks into helplessness.
A government has been saying the only way out of the dark and dreary woods is a vaccine. Somewhere in the wealthier human territories, vaccines are about to be released. The same government promptly responds: we have no money to acquire the health solution.
How will the historians deal with these seven months and few days? As true of histories, the accounts may focus on big names, like those figuring in the internecine conflicts in Congress. Senators, who have been unusually quiet, may not be part of the narrative, or maybe just some of them. A prologue will be devoted to the Dolomite. There will be chapters on migration and how the age of retirement for Chinese has been pegged at 35 years. The church unduly quiet will be in the appendix. There will be a section on webinars, and how everyone, overnight, turned experts on healing and caring. Footnotes on online shopping and online delivery will clutter the document; there shall be a running commentary about death from Covid-19 and more deaths from an infected, sick, dying government.