COVID-19: Reflecting on the Past and Present, Planning the Future
We are currently living in scary but inexplicably exciting times. And the reason why I am claiming this is because the COVID-19 pandemic is a worldwide crisis happening across the planet, influencing numerous countries at an unprecedented scale (at least since the end of WWII) by creating, among other things, a sense of insecurity at the social, cultural and political levels. The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest crisis in the era of global capitalism, and definitely the most prominent one in our lifetime. It has revealed chronic ills in many countries all over the world, shockingly in some of the most “developed” ones: a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public. Even though lots of us have been discussing these issues with family and friends, they had gone untreated for years. People had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. The outbreak of the pandemic in the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants fell like lightning, like most disasters, earthquakes, fires, floods. Of course, many of us were following the developments in China and we had signs. Nonetheless, when something like this unfolds far away from you, you tend to think that the evil on the threshold of the future does not concern you. Especially in the Western world, due to its fast and, to a certain extent, delusional pace of life, the outbreak of the virus was dealt with as another piece of news among many. After the first surprise, we slowly started taking the poison in small doses. A little worry, some precautions, a little preparation, some tolerance for the restrictions on our individual freedom. Suddenly we realized that we were in an arena and we had to fight a beast. But we were now accustomed to the poison, something which is called mithridatism. It was our psychological self-defense to take the new condition in small doses. In my opinion, the pace at which we all lived, as well as the search for ever- increasing economic growth, had now become something unbearable. Since we have been quarantined, in different forms and to different degrees in various countries, I feel that people have started realizing the need to prioritize
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