Hope? Or Hell in a Handbasket?

Is it okay to hope?  With all of the loss and the hardships we are dealing with and the virus numbers climbing at alarming rates?  Yes, we know that this will not last forever and there will come a day when we can leave our homes again and get back to our lives.  It helps that the sun is shining and the earth is being reborn and shedding its winter coat.  We can believe in better days ahead.  Can’t we?  According to the news media, we still have months of lockdown ahead of us.

This Easter weekend will be particularly difficult with the sharpest rise in infections and deaths predicted by the experts.  People will be anxious to gather with friends, get outside and enjoy the freshness of spring.  It’s a time for hiding eggs and going to church, if that’s your thing, and sharing a feast with family and friends.  But we can’t do that. We are in lockdown.   We will have to be content, or not, with a quiet Easter dinner alone, or with our inmates, or by connecting through video chat and phone.  We’ll have our walks around our own neighbourhood or backyard.  A friend told me today that the grocery store has a huge amount of large turkeys in stock.  No one is buying them because there is no one to eat them.  How sad is that??   But we will get through this.

Along with the daily doom and gloom, the media has been talking a lot about how we will never be the same after this. We will be better than before.  They are selling Hope. We will all have learned a valuable lesson from this whole thing and our world will be changed.  People will be kinder for having come through this together, they will have a greater appreciation for what they have after losing it for a while.  They will be more respectful of the homeless and the poor after coming so close to that themselves.   We’ll take better care of earth now that we have seen how much we impact it with our filthy ways.   Life will be so much better.  Think of how people feel after a war is over.  Like coming through the darkness to light with hope for a better tomorrow.  They go shopping, make babies, start working again, promise to be better people after all the horrible things the war has done to the world’s psyche.   We are expected to be like that with this pandemic.  Full of hope even though we aren’t even close to the end. 

While I would like to buy what the media is selling, the cynic in me is calling bullshit. I suspect we are all on our way to Hell in a handbasket.  I would love to believe we will have changed for the better.   But I don’t know.   This whole COVID-19 pandemic has made us afraid of each other.   Because we won’t know when this virus will be truly gone, we are being asked to take precautions even after the lockdown is over in order to prevent a resurgence.  There was talk today on the news about how the handshake is going to become a thing of the past because it’s the fastest way to spread a germ.   Bob sneezes into his hand, shakes hands with Bill, Bill picks his nose and BAM before you know it the world is in trouble again.  It won’t end.  So we have to be careful because we don’t want this to happen again.   People will be cautious, they won’t touch, they won’t stand close, they won’t gather.  Maybe I am being a little too overdramatic.  Let me say what I really think will happen going forward.

At first, we will behave differently.  We’ll realize that we enjoyed spending time with our families and maybe continue some of the activities we did while cooped up together.  We’ll realize that time is more important than things.  And for a while, we’ll do things differently.   We’ll be more conscious of recycling and maybe try not to use our cars as much because we like how the earth is healing.   We’ll be more conscious of hygiene and wash our hands more often and try to do the things that we are being told to do to prevent another pandemic.  For a while.  But the kinds of changes we are making now are very hard to do on a permanent basis right?  You have to go back to work, and school, and sports events and swimming lessons and all of those things because it’s what we do.  And eventually, we’ll get very busy again and our new hopeful future will fall by the wayside as we get numb and careless again.  Until the next catastrophe.  I truly believe this because it is what we have always done.   There was never supposed to be another war after World War 1, because it was so horrific.  But there was and still is and always will be war.

  

The sheer numbers of people who are refusing to follow the protocol of this pandemic are proof to me that things won’t change.   Not for most people.  Most of us will fall back to the status quo.  And I hate feeling this way.   But I am the type of person who tends to expect the worst so I won’t be disappointed. 

So, prove me wrong.  Be kinder, be more aware, be more diligent, be more human.  Give me a reason to be hopeful.   Because this handbasket we are in is pretty uncomfortable.