The Eye of COVID
We know how to react to a hurricane — evacuate to higher ground, hunker down with sandbags, plywood, generators, food, and supplies. Knowing what to do is easy, even though the storm will be brutal.
But preventing storms is much more complicated. We need to study them and do the science. Takes time. We need to do things now and make sacrifices so that maybe things might be different later — but we’ll never know for sure because storms will still happen. Doing this is difficult and frustrating and requires faith in what we think we know.
COVID is an act of nature, too, just like hurricanes. We know what to do when COVID gets bad — just like when a storm hits — however, do we know how to prevent COVID in the first place? Yes and no.
I have a theory: Health authorities are doing a give & take right now by relaxing COVID protocols. This is the giving back of our lives. A brutal, resurgent wave of the disease is inevitable — maybe months from now or even years, but it WILL happen, we just don’t know when. The only way we avoid this inevitability is if there is non-stop nagging — to wear masks, get shots, etc. — but if the authorities do that, everyone will hate it. No one will ever appreciate the good that does because the worst never happens. People will think, “Why did we do all that? For nothing?”
Yes. Exactly. Nothing is what we want.
But people don’t appreciate that. So, give & take presents an opportunity for health authorities to demonstrate the ebb & flow of cause & effect. If we let down our guard, we can SEE that COVID returns. It’s obvious. Then, as we enforce protocols again, we can SEE how COVID retreats. Of course, the true dynamic of this ebb & flow is infinitely more complex, but people can’t comprehend all that. They won’t SEE it because they can’t.
Climate change will require relentless storms before it truly gets the attention of most people. The very same is true of COVID waves. Most people would rather just react because that is easy, and we are heroic when we fight adversity that is there to SEE — we have power over our fate. But being proactive is hard, with dubious results that are invisible to us.
When it comes to being that the storms are one after another — relentless — then there will be no time in-between to let down our guard. We are forced, then, to be persistent in our efforts to fight the climate always, which is exactly what we should have been doing all along. But we can’t SEE it until there is nothing else to see.
The same with COVID.
