Wake Up Call

20 Realizations The Covid-19 Pandemic Reveal to us About Ourselves, Circumstances and Societies.

By Stephen Cocconi

Nature and her systems of biological evolution are all encompassing, far more enduring, and vastly less predictable than the antics of humans. Human systems are what we participate in and impose upon each other with institutions like: democracy, capitalism, or war. Living within Mother Nature’s biosphere, no matter what one believes, we are subjected to her! Not the other way around.

Very little about this article has to do with predictions about the Covid-19 virus [SARS-CoV-2] or suggestions to defend against infection or transmission. Instead, it is a commentary about how a natural phenomenon, a virus, puts us all on equal footing and might influence our humanity – especially in terms of raising individual awareness or behavior modification, and how those could shape our collective future.

A phrase, speculatively attributed to the ancient Chinese as a curse is: “May you live in interesting times.” It is an amazing time to be alive. Crisis is, however, unpredictable. But the actual Chinese the term for crisis has two parts: danger and opportunity. The situation with this pandemic possesses aspects of both. It is animal nature to fear change because one cannot control its outcomes. Humans often resist change because of the belief that one might lose with no guarantee of any gain. And, sometimes that is true. But the fear of the unknown is usually far worse than any actual outcome. Yet change is inevitable! It can only be resisted or it can be led. But not stopped! One can use fear to become awake and confront what is within your means to control or wallow and hide from those things that you feel powerless over. Paralysis is always a negative! Time to “wait and see” has passed.

We know enough of what we must do. The major casualties of this multi-tier crisis will not be human deaths, or even economic collapse; it will be the destruction to many of our cherished beliefs we held as truth and ritual habits we practiced as natural rights. We can survive these changes. But a substantial majority won’t like them and complain bitterly about the process, some violently so. Choosing to complain, without taking meaningful action to address a problem is what has made humanity a convenience-based and medicated society: suppress the symptoms and ignore the causes.

Thus, no matter what the actual outcome in terms of infections and deaths from this virus, several flaws in our thinking and the institutions built upon them are being revealed; IF we care to really look. Then, we may use that feedback to purposely and voluntarily reorient and restructure ourselves, our circumstances and our societies. Otherwise, history shows that we succumb to fear or powerlessness. When we do, we often hand over control to reactionaries who will impose solutions upon us, instead. Let’s think about change for ourselves.

Here are some things I notice.

1. Systemic fear was ready to burst to the surface. First panic, now waiting, then boredom, then new emergence.
2. When time stands still, you get a chance to know yourself. Will you notice?
3. Awaken your powers of improvisation and creativity. Necessity has that effect.
4. Transform grief into gratitude and loss-of control into personal accountability.
5. Humans are addicted to busyness, convenience, and entertainment. Many can’t sit quietly.
6. Reclaim your time from distraction or over-engagement. What will you do with it?
7. Realizing how well connected, or how isolated, you have become. Who matters to you? Who do you matter to?
8. There is plenty of food in the developed countries, if you can afford to pay for it.
9. World economies built for profit, not progress, are fragile not healthy. Wishful thinking and social myths deceive us.
10. Reveals how human work arrangements are completely at the whim of those in power.
11. For consumer-based societies, there is a need for some kind of Universal Basic Income.
12. Governments will be forced to become more totalitarian. Unless citizens reengage and the powerful are challenged.
13. Incentives appealing to greed are the surest way to invite evil results. Rewarding unearned privilege is a way to incite violence.
14. The world health care systems are woefully inadequate because of business practices; not pharmacology, technology or caregivers.
15. Those with power and wealth will end up with more power and wealth, until the rest say enough!
16. Scientific and mathematical illiteracy is a crisis for humanity. Many can’t do arithmetic or read a graph.
17. Human overpopulation is unsustainable and is destabilizing the ecosystem.
18. God rescues no one! Free-will to choose does not allow it.
19. There is no other place to go! Earth is All we Have!
20. Believe it or not, like it or not, we are all in this together.

In Summation:

Humans are the dominant mega-fauna on planet Earth. Our species, with no rival animal predators, except one another, occupies every land mass on the globe. Yet with our amazing brains, our insatiable appetites, and our pathological need to play god-the-technological, we are the only species found in the fossil record to act so self-destructively to its environment (i.e. through pollution, overpopulation, and resource decimation). According to EcoWatch, 96% of the mammalian biome of Earth is either humans or the species we propagate for our benefit. (i.e. cattle, all food and farm stock, and pets: primarily cats and dogs.)

Diseases are nature’s microscopic predators upon us. If not Covid-19, or other diseases that follow — some probably man-made, will ravage the human population and eventually thin the size of our unsustainable herd. When…is the only unpredictable variable.

There are no real differences in the human species only the artificial constructs of separation we pretend. National borders, even with walls, exchange air, are subject to the same microbes, have climate, and all depend upon the same kinds of food and water for life itself. Nationalities, race, languages, income levels, even sex and gender, or geography do not differentiate us so significantly as to constitute any real distinction except to call us: varieties. The only differences are in our decorations and descriptions, not our substance. Yet, those differences matter not in quality of humanness, but they are invoked in the unjustified ways we treat one another; relegating many to impoverishment while elevating a few to heights of unearned privilege. The Covid-19 pandemic has irrevocably revealed the fallacy of those ideas, but the obvious use of them, as well. Everyone feels! And everyone loves someone. But for the most part it seems that we are turning to people of knowledge of our inseparability; instead of promoters of some ideology, philosophy, theology, or irrationality who deceive us about some inherent uniqueness of a chosen people. Hurrah! Perhaps we can come together as a species at last?

Disease does not make war on us. Nor are we being punished by God. We are merely being subjected to the magnificence of Nature in all her powerful and ultimately unbiased effects. Oh sure, we can waste time blaming perpetrators (only if it led to reform) or accept defeat and resign to victimhood, or we can realize what we do with, and for, each other ultimately benefits all…including planet Earth itself. But, if we continue to live the illusion that it’s Us versus Them, Self and Other, Mine or Yours, paradigm; then humanity will have squandered the Wake-Up Call, that these Nexus events are alerting us to. That too would be a choice.

Let’s embrace this opportunity, shall we?