Life would have to change not only in America, but in as many as 190 countries around the known world except Antarctica.
by Victor Cherubim
The question in many minds is why Coronavirus attacked more Afro-Americans and caused more deaths than native White population, has been unsurprising. This may easily be explained because when I lived in the United States some 63 years ago, I saw longstanding inequality, and recently when I visited America some 50 years later, I saw many hundreds of coloured Americans stoically overweight and unbearably obese. Yet today researchers state that institutional racism and the fact black and ethnic minority population around are starved of proper social heath care, do not enjoy hygienic living standards due to the disparity of living, but most of all because they feared they will be more discriminated and marginalised as “untouchables”.
This is a pathetic state of affairs in most of the largest of American cities, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago but also in other states where Medicare is rationed by virtue of privilege and status.
When the world finally emerges from the pandemic and restrictions are ended, or lifted
piecemeal, the greatest “social” revolution in over several epochs or hundreds of years would begin to change America. That what Abraham Lincoln fought for and what John F. Kennedy sought out and Martin Luther King “dreamed of” and Barak Obama tried desperately hard to establish, would at least begin to dawn in the minds and hearts of all America.
Life would have to change not only in America, but in as many as 190 countries around the known world except Antarctica. The reservoir of emotion, newfound emancipation, as well as pent up demand for living life healthy and fitter, will be revolutionized and look very different to what it was, or has been in decades.
Given that this cannot happen overnight, months of lockdown, years of trouble and strife, decades of hope and frustration, centuries of slavery of health, could not only have changed patterns of behaviour forever, but could well revolutionise man’s inhumanity to man in unthinkable ways.
We may be able not to quantify these changes, but we may now at least be able to visualise what the pandemic had achieved in its destruction of near two million lives by the time it abates, if it really does have an end date.
How people live, what we eat, how we work, what we do to regain our health, how we enjoy ourselves, how we make peace with nature, how we value our humanity in the future?
The changes ahead
What will life be in 2022? The short term changes have all been in the making over years or even decades, but will soon come into focus. Like every revolution, this social revolution will mean more and more people treating people more as human, rather than
Identities of race, religion, or remnants of a bygone era.
We already see an unspoken “social conscience. “The work ethic has perhaps, changed people’s perception. Frontline staff, like nurses, doctors, carers for the sick and the elderly, will soon be paid more for their service delivery. Street sweepers may no longer be treated as lower rungs of society, they will perform a service to preserve health and hygiene. Class may take on a new meaning and colour of one’s skin may not be the criteria of identity or ability. With new research in contract tracing techniques, lost and found people, particularly lost persons, and children, may be able to be traced easily.
Codes of ethics in medicine, particularly who has the right to life, the definition of what constitutes organ failure and death, may be challenged in courts. Besides, codes of ethics-integrity, objectivity, professional competence, confidentiality, professional behaviour/conduct, and clarification in law if it does not already exist, of understanding the difference between right and wrong, will come into focus.
Travel and transport which has been curtailed or even restricted will undergo many changes soon. There will necessarily be profound long-term effects on air, sea, road travel and transport. In fact, business trips by air and long distance air, train cruise liner journeys may change. Some of it may be vulnerable and replaced by video conferencing, perhaps, virtual travel may become the new idea of holidaying.
Hopefully, we may use this crisis to rebuild confidence, resilience, produce something better and more human in our relationships or could we slide instead into something more confused, worse than we have ever imagined?
Could there be a World War III between nations? A war to rebalance this pandemic as in times past? I shudder to contemplate this situation.
I think, whatever the outcome of this pandemic a very different kind of economics, politics, and society will usher in, perhaps, to build a socially just and ecologically sound future for mankind and of course, nature.
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