Monday, May 11, 2020

Pandemic


A virus latched on to the human microbiome and turned this world upside down. It traveled across nations and continents without a passport but used all that humans had achieved over a million years to move from Main street to Mars. Even in the age of travel bans for whimsical reasons, the sudden surge in the spread and the mortality rates have spooked governments and people alike. The systems we have built to shield and preserve ourselves are teetering at the edge of collapse. It is staggering to think that if the Virus was a bit more lethal than it already is, civilization, as we know, could have been facing its worst existential threat. I hope the price to conquer this unseen enemy will not be too high by the time when it will be over.
In the meantime, it is important to keep the senses normal as much as possible when everything normal as we know - daily rides to school, work, grocery stores, weekend visits to family, and friends have been halted. We are quarantining ourselves at home, county, states, and countries to wait out the pandemic and survive. The long line of migrant workers in Delhi walking the longest distance home, doctors, and nurses appealing for supplies and medical equipment from the corners of New Orleans and New Jersey are stark reminders that the system is under heavy stress.
Jose Saramago's dystopian novel Blindness is a chilling inquiry into what makes us human in the face of an epidemic of "white blindness". The eerie sense of panic we feel now is the backdrop of Saramago's story in which the fabric of society is torn apart when the government attempting to contain the contagion with increasingly inept and repressive measures, while overcrowded asylums degrade living conditions surrounded by military. The internees battle each other and burn down the asylum only to find that the army has abandoned the asylum, who afterwards join the throngs of wandering blind people in a devastated city to fight and survive. The story ends with the ailment vanishing as suddenly and inexplicably as it had begun, but not before putting human capacity to cope with its ultimate test.
For our own sake, let's keep everyone's health and wellbeing in our prayers and hope for a flattened curve and cure soon.

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