Like many of us, my mind has been going numb lately with all the news around the Covid 19 virus and it's devastating implications for the world. I am starting to feel like Eeyore looks in the image emblazoned above this opinion (or rant) piece. This feeling, a confluence of sadness, fear and disgust that can steer me either into depression or a muted revelation. Oh, and rumor has it that this artist's rendering of Tigger, Pooh, Piglet and Eeyore was created on the back roads of Wuhan, China as the quartet was fleeing, trying to avoid being slaughtered and eaten, since tigers, bears, pigs and donkeys are just some of the animals "processed" on the underground and above board wild life farms in China (along with snakes, raccoon dogs, bats, porcupines, peacocks, bamboo rats, civet cats, foxes, bear and more).
Wild Life farming has been a thriving / surviving industry in China and while most Chinese do not eat this variety of wild life, the rich and upper class tend to revel in the eating of these delicacies at certain restaurants that serve up boar or peacock because they are considered to have almost magical health properties. The belief in the ability to obtain, to absorb the animals' physical strength or sexual virility is stoked by ancient folk tales and spread further as pseudo science on social media. Scouring the internet and viewing the barbaric way in which these animals are raised, penned in cages with no room to move is horrific. I imagine the desire to roam free is non-existent and that death is a welcome relief. The imagery of a hunter killing a deer, dressing it and enjoying the results of the kill, a once distasteful feeling in my gut feels now like something at least more natural and a lot less barbaric. As a meat eater, the notion of farming chickens, pigs and cattle now feels wrong too. The notion of becoming a vegetarian looms large in my mind.
While the cultural reasons for wild life farming is complex and deeply rooted in China's past, I cannot help but feel that the current Covid 19 problem, like environmental concerns, like poverty, like trade and real wars are systemic problems that ultimately can only be solved by us, that is you and me, everyone looking at life in a different way. It has to do with caring about people that you don't know. It has to do with realizing that everyone is your neighbor and that you have a stake in their well being and they have a stake in yours, not just financially but morally.
We are in a time when we are told that social distancing might just save us and while that may be true with Covid 19, social distancing maybe exactly be what got us here and what ultimately can result in a slow sociological suicide. We are increasingly becoming divided, cut off from those around us. When the devastating Flint water crisis came to light in Michigan, we all were shocked but we all didn't really care about the families who were severely impacted, at least not in a real way. not as if it happened to us. When the unprecedented deaths at the hands of school shooters was front page news over and over again, while we all comment and do care in the sense that some of us contacted our political representatives or wrote letters and signed petitions we didn't, cannot feel the pain of those involved. None of us will carry the pain and fight for change like the parent of a child who was killed by a mass shooter. Maybe as a survival instinct, we keep socially and emotionally distant from all the tragedies that are going on all over the world.
In 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War, there was a mass genocide of the Tutsi Twa and moderate Hutu and in 100 days, between April 7th and July 15th, 800,000 men, women and children were slaughtered. Imagine that. 100 days and 800,000 lives taken by bullet, by machete and some of you reading this, who do not burden themselves with world events, may not of even known that this existed. For the most part, the world watched from afar. No one rushed to help and even though it will be debated forever if anyone could do anything, writers have called it a preventable genocide.
Obviously, there are thousands of horrors to pick from and while those not affected might mutter, "Oh, that is horrible" under their collective breath while scanning Net Flix for the next binge watching series, we are not... we are NOT feeling them. We have gone numb. We are distanced from it. We are distanced from our neighbors even. I have spoken to many a causal acquaintance who literally have never spoken to their neighbors.
Not caring about other's lot in life while having this increasing desire to peak in on people lives at every turn is a weird dichotomy and an ill side effect of the democratization of social media. Everyone has a phone, a screen to look at even four year olds (parental controls noted), even the homeless (a good thing). It is in many ways a glorious time to be connected but then again, maybe a slow burning festering part of the problem. The phone and social media can in the right hands be an instrument that shapes policy and can even topple inadequate regimes, but those (again) are the people who would do the same thing with a sword or a pen. For the rest of us, that phone and social media is an opiate of the masses. A way to escape. An electronic drug.
"A rising tide lifts all boats", I have always loved that quote. It can be used, by a gifted speaker, to mean many things but, to me, I take it as meaning that if we as a people, as a society of people, institute practices and policies that help all people to prosper emotionally (and financially) then we will all benefit in big ways. At the heart of this human equation is doing this because we care about our fellow brothers and sisters. The Spanish Flue of 1918 comes to mind. As you may already know, many researchers and historians believe that this pandemic originated in China. There is archival evidence that suggest that a year earlier the respiratory illness infected locals in Northern, China. As World War 1 brewed, 96,000 Chinese laborers were mobilized to work behind British and French lines on the Western Front. Other puzzle pieces, too many to mention here, contributed to the pandemic but I wonder if basic inhumanity, of looking at the Chinese laborers as less than human, could of contributed to all of this. WE have a long history of racism and treating the Chinese as chattel as the rail roads were being built across America. I do not know how the (Spanish Flu) Laborers were treated (exactly) but, because taking them around Africa would take too long, many were shipped from the Chinese port of Wehaiwei to Vancouver, Canada, placed in Sealed Rail Cars to send via train to Halifax (on the East Coast) where they would again board ships to Europe. This Canada connection could of spread the virus to the Americas while the laborers in Europe helped spread it basically world-wide.
It makes me wonder if seeing those laborers as not us but them contributed to less than humane conditions that could of also contributed to the cultivation of the viral spread. Whether wild life penned up like sardines in cages or Chinese workers stacked inside Sealed Rail Cars it is an inhumane image no matter what the reasons were for doing it. It again speaks to our image of ourselves and how we form deep levels of empathy not based on direct blood or lineage but to ourselves as creatures, live breathing complex organisms as part of a whole and by extension caring deeply about our environment too. I know someone who is into bees. He manages his own bee colonies, harvests honey from their hives. He told me several months ago that "If the bee population dies we are fucked. Our ecosystem, life as we know it would slowly die out. We would be extinct." At the time, I didn't think this was a real thing but it might be. Those busy bees are part of the whole.
So as you read this hobbled collection of thoughts fueled by my ultimate fears (and I won't even get into my deepest fears of a governmental conspiracy to control us my spreading fear) I hope you realize what I am getting at. The only thing that will ultimately save humanity from itself is our own humanity. A deep respect and love for others and the creatures that inhabit the earth, an increased sense of stewardship of our earth itself. I know, I know that this is all Pollyanna hippie shit immortalized in poetry, in the unbelievably iconic song Imagine written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono but it is a vital thing we have to do. I am not talking about Communism or a one world government. I am talking about a deep "interconnectedness" between all people that only seems to happen in Science Fiction blockbusters when an Alien Presence attacks the earth and we all join in to battle them.
I ask you to think about it, to take one or two days a week to extend out further than your inner family. It can be globally meeting people who are into a similar cause than you are. It could be reaching out to someone online that you do not agree with and creating an understanding of each others dogma, or hell, it could just be going outside and meeting, speaking with your neighbor from 6 feet away, of course.
We will, in the end, contain, manage, kill the Covid 19 virus but will we learn from past mistakes? In the end as people and as governments we need an injection of love and it will be the most difficult complex elixir to make and spread and absorb fully but it is crucial that we do this. Becoming a one world family has never been so important. If we fail, then as my bee keeping friend said, "...we are fucked".
-Robb Donker Curtius
This is an opinion piece. I gathered my information from various sources. If you want a list or want to talk about this piece, email me at americanpancakelive@gmail.com
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