Covid 19 as 2020 Challenge

When we started this New Year, no one really knew what this year had to offer.

We heard via the news about the epidemic of this novel virus in China, and that they were making massive efforts to control the spread.

They shut down a good chunk of the country. A few of us watched the Chinese people using fogging equipment to spray down the streets, thinking ...oh propaganda.  Until it spread past China despite the lockdown, they tried. People went around it. It spread to the Middle East, the US, Europe.

We knew coping with winter in Canada, it was coming.

When it came, back in the spring, I watched our government do a complete about-face in policy. They literally shut down the country. Ironically enough, earlier with the tensions between Indigenous peoples and land rights and the overreaching reaction of the RCMP in Northern BC, the people were in the streets. They stormed the BC Legislature in a show of force and protest. No more were the people going to tolerate the excuses.  But now, the pause, and then...shutdown.

The Federal Government of Canada was prepared to pay people to stay home with an emergency benefit. The hope was to flatten the curve, as this virus was now a worldwide pandemic.

Scientists are racing to publish what little they knew. Donald Trump, in the US, complained that the Chinese were responsible or not telling the world. They did, not through diplomatic channels. It was in the journals, case studies of what the doctors were finding from the people sick—the beginnings of some everyday experiences, and some strange immune system ones. Micro and macro damage of this virus in the bodies, this became the story of a scary nightmare.

It has been almost 100 years since we had to deal with a virus like this. Spanish flu was the last pandemic and its second wave that came after people isolated themselves or stopped certain activities by order of Public Health.

The money flowed fast, and at this time, we have a potential candidate for a vaccine that may need a booster.  Thing is we are learning that while global logistics with computer assistance can be fantastic, it is also challenging when a needed supply is not available due to financial compensation. The US has shown both its might, its values, and its differences. Many countries watched as this mighty technological, financial Goliath is unable to stop the smallest threat, an invisible virus. All the past American movies about pandemics....all shown to be false in terms of people working together. Politics and personal rights seem to "trump" common sense and community respect for the good of the group. While I knew that even Canadian Charter Rights about freedom of mobility were being curtailed by Public Health Orders and restrictions, the idea I could inadvertently spread a virus with no known good treatment, that was killing young and old alike without a whole lot more than maybe a pre-existing condition puts one at risk of death...I am a freedom fighter, but the freedom to stay alive for me knows full well that interconnected to the web of life, I am responsible for my part of the web. As a Druid, I know this truth inherently in my heart.

So I watch both stories of triumph, stories of compassion, and stories of disgraceful callousness. I watch a country to the south of us seem to lose its way with internal strife. Its leadership is both a laughing stock and a shameful mess. Brash, pushy, and refusing to listen, showing that if you favour him like a bad king of the days of old....well, that is not the kind of democracy I believe in. "We the people..." is the start of one of their formative documents, but I QUESTION....who does that apply to in the experiment called America.  This there still colonialism is interwoven in their fabric.

I know that is true in Canada, and part of the decolonize challenge to restore the equality and justice we know is inherently true and right needs to address the legacy of the Indian Act and the deliberate duress negotiations we put our Indigenous peoples through to come here. They know full well every immigrant and colonizer in the past were not the rich or the ones of wealth or status. They know they were pawns of politics, poor, disenfranchised people. At the time, those policymakers or leaders knew that the land they were sending people to was not theirs, and the colonizers were none the wiser at the time. The fact that so much of the nasty and grossly inhumane treatment of Indigenous peoples was both a product of segregation and disinformation and worse, all attitudes and beliefs about the value of their humanity as a people or peoples, is the problem we modern inheritors of the system need to address. It's not a broken system; it works just fine to continue to perpetuate the injustice that always was there. Its a system that has to be wholly revised or changed, because not only is it not right, the values we espouse to and need, include all peoples and points of view. It is possible to do it. After all, these days, our laws are written on paper, or better, keystrokes in computer databases. Easily changed.

What happens though, is with disruption, either caused by external forces, like natural weather events or pandemics, is that we start to live differently. Quietly, we begin to examine what is what. I was having an easier time than my family. This path sort of forces changes on you, as part of growing into a better person and Druid. I watched them struggle and frustration at the lack of control and had to suggest and remind that its a lot of energy that is going nowhere. Staying in place is an action, but we have not seen it that way in our North American culture.

While I do not buy into China's foreign policies or views politically, and won't ever value how they value a group cohesion at the expense of the individual freedom, because that stifles creativity and people reporting issues...there is something to be said at the fact that the US model of how they are coping with a crisis as a group is not something to aspire to as a nation. I have believed for a long time that Muslim countries need to create their own model of democracy, not adopt the one of the USA.  I think that they can and should, to modernize their nations and to share their worldview and values in the world. Because deep down, inherently, all the major religious groups share the same sort of value of the treat others as you want to be treated, underlying what makes us human is compassion. But there are still a few that seemingly benefit from a lack of empathy, and we somehow need to encourage others to look at the downsides; lacking understanding, one lacks a sense of belonging.

We can choose our "tribe," "community," group. We need healthy ones, and allow individuals to grow so that the pool of talent expands for humanity. If we cannot learn to connect and empathize with life and see suffering as part of a condition of living, and that addressing plight is part of the deal with living, we will fail to contain our destructiveness as a species.