I lay on my bed. The lights are out and the room is dark. I look at the white ceiling over my head. There are constant screeching sounds made by the train coming through every 6 minutes. However, these sounds do not break through to my wandering mind. I am in my own world. I am trying to find answers to the questions I think need to be answered.
Is the world coming to an end? Will humanity find a way to understand each other? And when we will return to any sense of normalcy again? And when will I be with my love again?
It all begun in year 2020 ….or did it? Everything changed. The world went through trauma and pains because lots of people started to die within a short while. However, there was initially a sense of indifference because the problem was far off. We started the year 2020 with reports of a new and fast spreading respiratory virus. The SARS-COV-2 virus was the enemy causing the COVID-19 disease. Even though this was relatively new, we relied on old techniques to combat the spread as we tried to understand the disease in its entirety. By March 11, 2020, COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic.
The joy of seeing family and friends dwarfed the stress of going through TSA, metal detectors and sitting in a crowded pressurized chamber for 12hours eating airplane meals. However, within the snap of a finger, all of this was taken away. The disease spread so fast in the world that, within the first month the worldwide cases rose from 126,868 to 1,728,070. That was 1262% increment. By the second month into the pandemic, global cases were 4,180,599. We did not have an end in sight.
It was happening. It was happening fast.
People were dying at alarming rates. In wars, we always knew who the enemy was and what they wanted. In this war, we knew who the enemy was. But we did not know what the enemy wanted. Therefore, we sure didn’t know how to win the war…initially. The world went through scores of people getting infected and dying. Rich. Poor. Famous. Infamous. Rulers. Commoners. Everyone. Anyone. Someone. Except no one. The early days were a time of grief and anguish. Death was so common but we never got used to it. The whole world grieved.
We fought back. Public health. Health care professionals. Medicines. And then vaccines.
The world fought back with all the tools we had. The first line of defense in fighting infections is the innate immunity. This is a non-specific line of defense used against all intruders. We think of public health as the innate immune system. Public health helped us to mount sweeping measures to fight the pandemic. Handwashing. Mask wearing. Social distancing. Health care workers and researchers were called into full swing to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. We worked tirelessly around the clock to keep people from dying…which they did…and to come up with a vaccine. This was more specific and directed at solving the problem, or so we thought. The adaptive immune system kicked in. Like soldiers in a battle, we kept fighting and we started winning the war over the pandemic….until another war broke out again.
We seem ready to end life as we know it just to prove we are invincible. Are we?
On the brink of a global war?
How do we measure the stress levels of the whole world? How do we measure the emotional state of everyone in the world? For many many years, the most common reason why people have fought wars was for land and the ability to control the people who live on the land. After the events of the global pandemic, the world has learnt that, things that happen many miles away can have an impact on you and your mental well being. Barely two weeks to the 2 year mark of the global pandemic, one powerful nation decides to invade another nation. The world is stressed again. Just when the dust from the pandemic had started to settle down, another global source of stress arises. The emotional outrage is similar. The world wakes up to uncertainty of return to normalcy. The world wakes up to new information that was much more devastating than the day before. People escaped the global pandemic just to be killed by bullets and bombs. This conflict appears different from the rest we have currently because of the threat of annihilation of the human race with man made weapons of mass destruction. We seem ready to end life as we know it just to prove we are invincible. Are we?
No. Man is not invincible.
Everyone will one day give an account of what we did with our lives and in our lives here on earth. And I am sure we will not want to say “I killed all these people so I can have power and control“. What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world, and yet loose his soul?
For those who have to fight the war know that: “Even the darkest night will end, and the sun will rise!”
God bless!
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