Covid-19: Will we Choose to be Predator or Savior?
If history has taught us anything — a big if — it’s that from time to time, over the years, we humans come at a crossroads and, in that case, we must choose. It is not always possible to stand by and watch: sometimes we have to make a decision. Robert Frost says, in his famous poem “The road not taken”:
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by — And that has made all the difference.”
All the uprisings, riots and wars never happen because of moral or religious reasons, but they always occur on economic grounds. A famous American example: Boston Tea Party, 1773; the English imposed heavy taxation and very unfair rules to their thirteen colonies and “Sons of Liberty” American activists organized a beautiful act of sabotage. Sons of Liberty activists, sponsored by American tea merchants (who were — de facto — cut off from their business) dressed themselves like Native Mohawk, then embarked on the anchored English ships and kept throwing the many and precious cases of english tea into the Boston Harbor sea. In a party like that, you had to take sides: English or American. You had to go choose and, in some cases, you had to pay your choice with your life.
Covid-19 just brought us in Robert Frost wood again. We have two diverging roads and we must choose one of them. Politicians, businessmen, journalists talk about start again, open again, get out again, pick up where we left off, like if lockdown was a book, or a tv series. You go first, I come after. Everybody can go running in the park but, hey, keep your distance! Go open restaurants but with Perspex among the tables. Open the beach or swimming-pool but with Perspex between umbrellas and sunbeds: ladies and gentlemen, here’s the great comeback of Plastic on this wasted screen! I mean: do you really think plastic is going to save us? Do you really think tracking app — meaning Google — is going to save us? An ancient proverb says: “Escape from the Wolf to bump into the Bear.” Well done: we both will. We can congratulate ourselves.
One thing’s for sure: wherever Covid-19 comes from — a lab or a pangolin — in any case it’s the result of a sick world. And, if our world is sick, world economy was terminally ill long before virus incoming. We humans are so similar to Siafu ants, which are considered most deadly predators all over Africa, able to kill one million prey per day. Their colonies are made by twenty million individuals, always moving and devouring every kind of animal they meet. We are so similar to them, but Siafu ants are so much smaller and less dangerous then we are.
Last thirty years accelerated path of capitalism, turning it into hyper-capitalism and making: few multi-billionaire men and billions of people who lack everything, food and meds included; a group of privileged workers who enjoy their amazing career, extremely well paid and, in many cases, obtained by politic or nepotism, in the face of so many workers doing exhausting, alienating and graveyard shift jobs paid by laughable salaries; unemployed and homeless in constant increasing; human species grown in numbers in a monstrous and invasive way, because if we can say “I buy ergo I am” it’s also true “I am ergo I buy”, that’s why so many people have to be born, live and die, just to keep “markets” satisfied.
Consequences: pollution, climate change, poverty, deprivation, depression and, last but not least, disease and outbreak.
Now, we find ourselves in front of this crossroad and we must choose: keep the old road that means holding plenty tight our big or small properties, keep invading, usurping, taking land and life out of the other organic creatures, keep raping the planet with everything in it, ourselves included, like true Predators.
I’m just trying to make it clear: to make some donations here or there won’t make you less Predator. To say “I’m Christian and I go to Church” when, around you, people is ill, homeless and starving: that’s not going to make you less Predator. To say “I’m progressive, I’m leftish” when you’re locking the door of your beautiful house, keeping outside alone all the desperate, the hopeless, the unlucky: that won’t make you less Predator. If we’re going to choose the old road, the more travelled, we’d better get ready. There’ll be more pandemics, there will be an economic recession that will make 2008 look like an oasis of peace, there will be different kind of wars, there will be fights, riots, slaughters, exterminations and Apocalypse and the World will be as one. But, those who can, will dance and toast in their gorgeous mansion, same way Titanic passengers did when the ship had already hit the iceberg.
Or, we could take the less traveled road. We could start to backtrack, give up the privileges, give up huge payroll and all the million dollars many persons have, give up trust funds, give up real estates, give up all the damn “money game” that kills so many people every single day. Just make sure our sons and daughters will always be rated by their merit and not thanks to nepotism. Change our rotten economic system, change our insane “way of life”, delete greed, share what we have with people who don’t have a thing, keep the growth of the human species under control: in few words, become Saviors.
I ain’t saying it will be easy. There is so much Siafu and very little Christ within us. To be Predator is easier, is automatic for the people, is part of our DNA. But, still, will you choose to be saved and save yourself, your sons and grandsons? Because it’s the less travelled road the one that makes the difference.
ANNO DOMINI 2020, May 7
