What if, centuries from now, historians think of the coronavirus not as a pandemic that killed millions of people but as a purifier… the catalyst that finally brought humanity together and got them to agree on global warming. How cool would that be?
Think back to what we were reading about before Covid-19 grabbed all the headlines. Everyday, somewhere in the world, someone doing something absolutely horrifying to someone else… blowing up a marketplace, shooting diners in a restaurant, driving into crowds of tourists, setting fire to villages. And all for the stupidest of reasons… the color of one’s skin, the language one speaks, the God one prays to. And then the group behind the atrocity announces to the media that they are the ones that did it… bragging about all the pain and suffering they have caused to fellow human beings. “Hey, guys, it was us. Aren’t we great? We’re the ones you should be afraid of.” Can you believe it?
But it’s more than that. Even before coronavirus, life for many was a touch and go affair. Earth’s resources are distributed so unequally as to be unimaginably cruel and unfair. Some people have so much more than they need while others have so much less than the minimum needed for survival. It is estimated that 1 in 9 people on Earth go to bed hungry every night, while almost 9 million people die of malnutrition every year. How inhumane is that?
Inhumanity spreading around the globe… like a pandemic. Person against person, tribe against tribe, religion against religion, culture against culture, country against country, race against race. How long can we continue in this direction? If we can’t get people to agree to stop randomly killing each other, how are we going to get them to agree on basic humanitarian efforts?
Just like the virus destroys the being on which it lives, humans are destroying the very planet on which we live. Our oceans filled with plastic garbage, our air filled with toxic chemicals, nuclear waste buried beneath the soil, forests being destroyed, species going extinct, and the balanced ecology that has nurtured all life from the very beginning starting to shudder under rising temperatures. Global warming? We can’t even agree on that!
Well how about shutting down a worldwide pandemic that could kill tens of millions of people and destroy economic and social life as we know it for decades to come. It is becoming clear we must put aside our differences and focus on the connections between us if we are to beat Covid-19. “Never before have I found a situation where how I behave so dramatically impacts your health and how you behave so dramatically impacts my health,” said Dr. Sanjay Gupta, neurosurgeon and CNN medical advisor, on a recent The Late Show. And he added. somewhat philosophically, “We are co-dependent on each other in a way that I’ve never seen before. There is an obligation here. If I don’t engage in these good behaviors for me, then I should do it for… the people around me.”
Yes. This is a moment in time when humanity is learning we are connected in the most invisible and intimate of ways. Think… not just for me… but for all of us. As presidential candidate Bernie Sanders put it during a televised debate… “If there was ever a moment when the entire world is in this together, this is that moment.”
Let’s hope he is right, that not only are we in this together, but we know we are in this together. It’s a lesson we have to learn if we want the planet to survive. And a big step on the road to New Consciousness… the next step in human evolution.
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