It’s all so grim. I’m not going to try to be ‘positive’ while writing. That will mean I’m in denial of the truth around and that this blog is some sort of ‘reconfirmation’ of that. At this moment, everyone across the world is doused in fear, frustration, and desperation. It is as though we have just understood what life’s uncertainty really means. Pandemic, wildfires, floods, storms, racial violence – there is no adversity that isn’t suffocating the world right now.
I understand that such difficult times have set in before and the generations then have braced through it. I remember the blurry black and white pictures in history textbooks. They haven’t left me – the architecture of civilizations, the World Wars, plague, colonizations, and so on. I would stare at these pictures and imagine how people would have lived through such disasters. They must have tried every narrow way to escape. Did they have any hope of escaping? Had they accepted their fate and stopped struggling? It devastated me to think how millions of people around the world during that era were subjected to immeasurable suffering.
Of course, something I never bothered to imagine but studied in school was the plague that had nabbed the world in different eras. People die of many diseases and plague was one, I thought. But now that I am in a world seized by a pandemic, I can imagine how terrified the world of the 14th century would be with the Black Death. These were the eras of limited knowledge, undiscovered medicines, unproven treatments. It would have been devastatingly confusing for people to conclude that they may be the carriers of disease which can be passed on. There would have been no escape. I imagine a mother infected by the plague telling her children to leave without her as she awaited her death. Today, in the world of advanced medicine, we understand what’s going on, what to do, what not to do. Intellectuals around us and the constant scientific research gives us hope that we will be back to normal. I cannot fathom that there was once a time when there was no hope, no escape.
