PERSEVERANCE 2.0
Saturday, Mar. 28, 2020
Our resilience as individuals – as families, organizations, businesses, and society as a whole – have not been tested like this in modern times.
We could point to past pandemics, but life then was nothing like today.
We could point to game-changing events like the great depression, world wars, natural disasters, and 9/11, but none offer comparisons we can hang our collective hats on.
They simply don’t compare.
While we watch the daily wrestle between science keeping us safe and governments keeping us on one page, it is difficult to reconcile the best responses we see to this massive threat to life and sanity as much better than ‘herding cats’ on a global scale.
We are reconciling our individual lives being twisted into the worst form of bad vacation movie since ‘The Russians Are Coming’. Or scary ‘War of the Worlds’ radio show.
Life, it seems, is imitating art and the gong-show is being run like a runaway clown show in some countries – and extremely well in others.
It’s too soon to laugh.
Late night comedy shows are addressing the situation by running re-runs.
We are binge-watching turmoil news, and escaping into fantasy-fiction avoidance of turmoil.
We got this.
No, we don’t.
There will likely be a second wave, as strong as the first in some countries, and like a tsunami in others who will have scarcely made it through the first wave before the second one crashes on their heads.
Yes, we should be comforted by the encouragement our political leaders are voicing, but they’ve not told us the truth before, so why should we trust them implicitly now?
They are aren’t listening to their doctors.
And we all know what that is like, because most of us don’t follow our own physician’s strongly worded warning?
We have seen the problem, and the problem is us.
We might be comforted by governments printing money to hand out, we are learning there is no clear understanding of what ‘essential’ means.
We can order products, but we cannot order calm, because if we could every Amazon delivery would be a picnic, complete with blanket, a blue sky and a park that is open.
Reader feedback:
In the time of Covid, little things can amuse, entertain, satisfy. BTW, golf courses have figured out how to stay open: no ball washers, no rakes, no community water on the course, flags not to be touched, one cart per golfer if not walking. As soon as they open I will be booking us a tee time. RH, Calgary, AB
| 