The Hard Question

I think we can all agree that we are living in a mad world right now where things don't seem so certain as they used to be and the future seems uncertain every passing day because of the way things are going.

 

The Covid-19 Pandemic has enveloped the whole world and the damage caused by Covid-19 is beyond imagination. From Schools, Colleges, and Universities to businesses everything has been hit and some places more than others.

 

The United Nations has warned that this Covid-19 pandemic is far more than a health crisis, it is affecting societies and economies at all levels. While the impact of the pandemic will vary from place to place, it will most likely increase poverty and inequalities on a global scale.

 

We look at the world today and we look to our world leaders for getting us out of this crisis, and we see world leaders who are not just biased but personally attacking each other by throwing around accusations and childish tantrums and who themselves have been accused of stoking hate crimes.

 

They only thing they seem to be interested in is accusing each other of the reason things are going bad right now, playing blame games pointing fingers, encroaching borders, using force, and violating the sovereignty of other nations.

They seem more interested in expansionism than development, rather than working together in the true sense and put a united front in the face of such a big humanitarian crisis like Covid-19.

 

We lack strong leadership in the world right now but it is not always the answer as we need to rely on ourselves too. Any change is possible at the grassroots level starting with each individual and society as a collective.

 

 

Humanity has been here before during the 1918 Spanish flu, cholera, Black Death and has been through many pandemics but none has been on the scale of Covid-19.

But it has also brought to the surface all of society's hidden skeletons in the closet and long persisting problems that we have been refusing to acknowledge for a long time.

 

The Covid-19 pandemic has not just disrupted the world economy and our way of life but it has also posed a serious question, can we honestly say we have evolved as human beings?

 

When speaking of human evolution, it's not a reference to the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection rather the moral evolution as an individual and society as a collective which is a product of human evolution. Human history as a whole is full of stories of both evolution and revolutions that brought upon the evolutions.

 

 

There have been many examples in our history where there have been many fearless revolutionaries and leaders from different walks of life, who decided to take a stance to bring about the change in the perspective or the perception of society as a whole towards injustice to guide us towards the right path.

 

But these changes have never been achieved without violence or without acknowledging the darker side of human history and all the wars over race, religion, and injustice.

 

It's been a long road for mankind when he first discovered fire in the Palaeolithic age. From the discovery of electricity by sir Benjamin Franklin to the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell and up to today's smartphone revolution by visionaries like Steve Jobs and many other prominent personalities in the field of technology.

 

The role of technology has been immense in our personal lives and it has enabled and connected people across the world from different ethnicities and backgrounds and all walks of life to share ideas and has given a platform to understand each other. We have advanced as a society in economic infrastructure, education, IT infrastructure.

 

We are here in the 21st century, a century of great technological advancements, yet as individuals and as a collective society we can't say the same about human evolution of morality, overcoming our own biases and prejudices and not being able to rise above our base impulses as a society irrespective of which part of the world we live in.

 

By now we are all familiar with the Black Lives Matter movement and what happened to George Floyd, who was killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was a victim of police brutality and racial discrimination and almost all the world came together on every continent to protest against racial injustice and police brutality.

 

As the whole incident of assault was recorded on video and shared extensively on social media and it made people realize there has always been a George Floyd among them.

 

But the truth of the matter is there have been many George Floyd's throughout history, and he certainly wasn't the first one. This also shows a pattern of how we haven't evolved as a society. It was a gut-punch to society and a wake-up call.

 

Not just what happened in the U.S but all over the world we hear about these kinds of incidents which manage to make it to the headline and disappear and there are several more incidents that don’t even make it to the news.

 

Why is it that we only start talking about the measures we need to take to avoid such incidents only after something horrible happens?

 

Why is it that even though civilizations have progressed through evolutions yet man's wild basic instinct has chosen to remain primitive refusing to evolve out of the cocoon of comfort.

 

For most of us, our mornings usually begin with getting immersed on the internet of things and news, jumping from one website to another blogs and tweets, breaking news stories to the latest scandals, consuming countless images and videos, sharing memes, reading everything there is to offer on screens of all shapes and sizes.

 

We celebrate 1000 likes on Instagram or Facebook and similar social media platforms, yet we have been so disconnected that now we prefer to remember people mostly by their social media profiles rather than how they are in personal lives.

 

Why is it that now we only identify someone or try to understand someone by what they tweeted about or what they posted on Instagram yet feeling isolated and not being able to connect with on a personal level or hold a conversation outside social media.

 

Health care workers who have sacrificed their lives and many are still fighting on the front lines in service of the others so that the rest of us can stay safe. Yet there have been incidents where the very people who are trying to save our lives haven't been treated well or were victims of violence.

What excuse do we have for the way we have been treating each other?

  The pandemic is forcing us to confront these hard questions that we've been trying to avoid.

 There is no use of studying our history if we keep repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different result which is kind of the definition of insanity.

History is only valuable when we learn from it and appreciate the journey we have taken to get where we are and remember the sacrifices made to get here and carry the wisdom forward to build a better society.

It's time to look inwards and seriously introspect what are we as a society, if we cannot be kind to each other and support each other, rather than spending hours in front of many screens of all sizes and shapes and believing and consuming everything we read and forgetting what it's like to connect with another human being.

 

The pandemic is not just asking questions but it has also presented an opportunity to correct our ways and let go of our bad habits. We can never truly become the so-called civilized world unless and until we learn to treat each other with respect and kindness.