Children played in the street, unfazed by the sounds of shelling nearby. Parents ready to grab their children at any moment and run fast to temporary shelter to attempt to save their lives for another day. Toddlers and infants freeze to death in the night.
That is not our dystopia. It is the story of civilian families in Syria, caught between a sealed Turkish border and shelling on all sides, in a war far filled with horrors far beyond our imaginations as we grow anxious over our 2%-8% chance of dying from a destructive virus that looks a bit like a Ferrero Rocher candy as illustrated.
It’s hard to say it helps to put things into perspective as those who are incubated, strapped down, without the allowance of family to provide comfort, and fortunate enough to have their own ventilator, feeling as if they’re drowning for days upon days, may actually prefer to be freezing to death in a war-torn country. The world is a sadist and certainly has no shortage of creative ideas for how to torture her inhabitants. To be fair, we torture her back and ensure equal agony on all sides.
It is perplexing how, given life is already so difficult with its illnesses and the mortal fate that we all share, we still manage to make everything so awful. It isn’t that hard to live a good life and doesn’t require a great deal of anything outside of healthy food, fresh air, safety and health, warmth, friends and family, and a roof over our heads. As a society we’re in such a race to innovate and make things better but what is better? If we rush to innovate to make things better and we’re creating technologies that optimize all of our work so that we no longer have jobs, and at the same time end up in a situation for one easily spread virus can take down our society literally overnight, are we actually making any progress forward?
This pandemic isn’t even that bad. Not to make light of the suffering of those who are made extremely ill by the virus, or the horrors dying alone gasping for breath. But it looks as though through all the deaths and after effects of surviving moderate and severe cases of the illness, we still as a society will exist, pretty much as we had prior to our 2020 plague. We’ll mourn the loss of loved ones, and in a worst case scenario that my pessimistic mind says will likely play out, 75% of us will experience the illness, and all of us will know someone who died from it. We’ll mourn collectively, we’ll scream out our tears, we’ll say our thanks to the healthcare workers on the frontline some who too gave their lives in this battle, unprepared and ill equipped. Then, one day, sooner or later, it will all be back to normal. And it will be up to us to not forget and to invest in battling such pandemics because they will return, likely in our lifetimes. If not a pandemic, then surely climate change, class warfare, and other challenges we face will take us down without much better planning and just a tinge of social architecting.
What if we took all of our collective intelligence and put this towards saving ourselves? There is only so much saving we can do. Wars will still be fought. Children will still freeze because sociopaths rule the world and, in many cases, hide behind religion and other myths which fuel the madness that makes it ok for death of the innocent to ever be ok.
Those partying on the beaches of Florida or the streets of Bourbon fail to see that they are shelling our nation right now, but the behavior of our masses is less horrific to me than how we as an advanced society have allowed ourselves to get here. To the point where nurses are begging for protective gear to be donated. Where people coughing and feverish cannot get a test to see if they have been exposed to the virus because protocols still ask if they’ve been to a foreign country with the illness when the illness is right here in our own backyards. And front yards. Where hospital administrators are telling our healthcare workers to reuse masks and where we do not have enough ventilators to save those who will need to be saved in a pandemic situation which has been modeled out and understood for years yet ignored by our government in inaction that can be defined as nothing short of criminal.
We will get through this. And, as the history books tell us, even the longest wars fought eventually come to an end. With our lives of maybe 100 years, if we’re lucky, time tells us stories differently than they are written. But there is no reason for any of this suffering. These self-inflicted wounds and slices that cut through the heart of the bare minimum things we need to just live our lives. Our dystopia is of our own making. As continue down this path I see the smoke billowing across our future, the dust settling on another failure of using all the brainpower and computing power we have to get ahead of the otherwise inevitable destruction that will toss all humanity so deep into a gaping pit with walls slippery and unclimbable, Mother Nature leaving us there, laughing at our once and many times avertible annihilation.
This is our dystopia.
life with interest 