200911 Covid-19 Six Months Sea Change
Lake Memphremagog, a yellow flower - these are everywhere, in every open space. I would welcome an identification! I will take a closer look this morning.
09/11
Where were you nineteen years ago, when the airplanes flew into the twin towers? I was in an office at 9:15, when a small TV was put on, showing the video footage of the crashes. I spent minutes believing, hoping it was a mock-up and not real, as more people gathered around the screen, while thousands were injured or killed in New York in one violent act of hatred. My father was 30 minutes out on a flight to California when its pilot turned back to Pearson Airport. That day and the next the sky was empty: no planes flew anywhere.
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It is six months since the Pandemic was declared. I remember that day like it was six months ago. Or a lifetime ago. B.C. : before covid-19. Our family has so far escaped infection. Many people have likewise escaped and this is driving the nonchalance one sees about. "See? it's safe. Relax." But that's a crap shoot. You don't know when your number is just an incubation period away. There is a new theory linking the disease to bradykinin's influence on the body's system.* The second fastest computer in the world took a week to process 2.5 billion genetic combinations, which highlighted the bradykinin involvement in covid-19. It explains many of the weirder symptoms of this virus. It is a breakthrough that might lead to better treatments. There are vaccines in the works worldwide but the development takes time and the trials take time. And then, the worldwide implementation of vaccination becomes the challenge. A nightmare of financial and logistical hurdles.
What would happen to a world where the economy simply collapses under the weight of the financial burden of a such a pandemic? After the Black Death, the European economic model underwent a fundamental change, when (incidentally) the essential workers were suddenly in demand and shook off the shackles of serfdom and began to acquire independence.** Perhaps this will disarm the modern money-based economy and allow a human-based economy to arise: of worth based on human life, and local sustainability, merged with global trade models that support minimal transportation of goods and services. The value of such a model would be in reducing human suffering, in environmental benefits, with reduced pollution and climate damage. If the fall is complete enough it could wipe out the artificial standard of monetary wealth and debt, re-assign worth to human beings (and all our planet's life).
The local village and it's meta-counterpart, the global village would care for its members as family, each person giving to the community the goods, services and kindnesses they can and each receiving the help and support of that community. Those who make the blue jeans will trade with those who grow the food so that both will eat and wear pants. Those who nurse the sick will be given food and blue jeans because they are caring for the sisters and brothers of the person who makes jeans and of the local baker. The traders and the CEOs will fare the same, because the CEO is nothing without the person who makes the jeans and grows the food and nurtures the health and happiness of everyone in the community. The "CEO" might be one of the contributors to the community, perhaps coordinating the transport of jeans and beans, finding helpers to build a house, or he might be a neighbour who sits in the sun and thinks, he still gets blue jeans and food, just like everyone else. But he only gets the Maserati when it's his turn to take it for a drive, and only if a group of people somewhere is interested in producing Maseratis. This model looks a lot like communism, but so far in the world communism has been accompanied by a hierarchy of domination and suppression between humans. But there is the possibility that we could embrace responsibility, kindness and generosity as our "gold" standards.
We will not achieve racial or gender or financial equality and an end to third-world slavery (so you "pay" them, but they must work in abominable conditions to afford one goat, a one-room house and many don't go to school or receive medical care.), and the pseudo-serfdom of the poor and marginalized in first-world countries.
I want to believe in the future. If those who hope and love, who already live with these ethics, would just all raise their hands at the same time, we might see that there are enough of us to bring about the "sea-change" that our world needs, not sometime in the future, but NOW. Human wealth, whether we know and embrace it or not, is in our health, our mutual care and support, our world and how we care for it, in the sunshine and the goldenrod and the oceans, forests and prairies that feed all things.
Thanks for listening. Keep safe.
Mumma Yaga
Children and nature are our wealth. The food of the earth is our wealth. Our poverty is in inequality between people and the suffering and death of numberless humans world-wide.
** https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-bright-side-of-the-black-death
Love the photo -- it's like a glimpse of paradise. We have some photos like that, too, such as with my wife and young son at a pumpkin farm, moments when the world seems irresistibly beautiful. After 9/11 one evening in a state of anxiety and upset I had a long phone call with my parents. They were appalled at what had occurred but they had also been through the Depression and the Second World War and had a longer view of how the world works. They were deeply saddened but weren't rattled in the same way as me -- and somehow that helped me.a lot that night.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Salem. I love the sense you give of your parents holding you in their strong hands - showing you a light.
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