The human world was more or less normal just a little while ago. We were rampaging through our environment destroying habitats and living things at our usual pace, a few among us were warning of dire trouble if we continued in this way. We worried about the economy and profits and wages, somehow that seemed way more important than the burning of the Amazonian rain forest or the warming of our oceans or the melting of distant glaciers. This was life as usual. One day we would all have solar panels and wind turbines and the destruction would halt, we would save all those poor animals. And the wars, well, it was ever thus. Refugees should mostly go home and face the music, we could only afford to take a few of them in.
In January we heard there was an epidemic of some sort in China, the other side of the world, and they were locking up whole cities. Those Chinese! How extreme! In February it was creeping out of China, it had a name, Covid-19, because apparently it first appeared in 2019 and we were just unaware of it. We were starting to take it seriously, this might be a game changer. In March it was here. People were scrambling, local governments were scrambling. Okay, now it's a pandemic.
Meanwhile, a bunch of oil-producing companies decide to have themselves a little trade war. Trade wars have become popular of late, so why not? Locally we benefit from lower gas prices, a nice bonus in a worrisome time, although I don't think the people in the oil-producing provinces saw it like that. Albertans were already underwater with house mortgages and job losses, a price war definitely was not a bonus for them. But hey, the people battling against pipelines running through their lands could relax a bit, it was now too expensive to build those pipelines, protests or not.
The pandemic settles in bigtime. Physical distancing, self isolation, shortages of personal protection equipment in hospitals, shutting of borders, daily talks from our political leaders admonishing us to stay strong, and so on. Then the bad news, Covid-19 running wild in nursing homes, elders dying like miserable flies, all alone and separated from families. The care they received was barely adequate in the good times, woefully absent now. The careworkers paid so badly that they have to work multiple jobs to stay afloat, thereby spreading the contagion amongst the most vulnerable. Whoops. Is our social system not working so good? Someone said you can measure a civilization by how well it takes care of its most vulnerable (or words to that effect)… is that what's happening here?
Here in my little corner of the world all hell breaks loose over the weekend: a lone gunman kills a bunch of people, some with malice aforethought and some very randomly, wrong place wrong time. A trail of devastation, burned houses burned cars and so many hearts utterly broken. They initially said they had him in custody but that wasn't true, they shot him dead and thensome. Is it any wonder?
Okay, this incident pales in comparison to the fighting going on in other parts of the world. Yemen is still at war, terrible things are happening in India and elsewhere, exacerbated by pandemic. Last night I heard that the price of oil dropped below zero, well below zero. Oilmen are paying people to take the so-called black gold off their hands, we are drowning in the stuff. Governments are literally printing money to pay people to buy groceries and other necessities. Amazon is hiring a hundred thousand new employees to keep up with their vastly expanded online business. I have an Amazon Prime membership which is supposed to entitle me to 2-day delivery service (around here that's more like 4-day, but who's counting), now I am lucky to get 2-month delivery service. As if Jeff B really needs the money.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry, it is absolutely hysterical. Who'da thunk a bloody virus would lay us this low? And this fast? Can we say House of Cards? The doomsayers said it would be our dependence on oil bringing on dramatic climate change and a devastated environment that we would succumb to. Well, the environment is doing just fine now, thank you very much. Left field, left field, we're all out in a left field.
May Day is just around the corner, Happy May Day!
2 comments:
You said it all and very well. What a time. I wrote about black swans in January but with no real concept of something like this coming-- a mega-black swan and for the world not just one place or another. I can't get my head around it and then we have someone like that nutty killer, another we can't seem to find in time. Ugh.
Black swans! That's the word all right. A whole flock of them!
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