2020 — a year of hope?
Boris Johnson bungled it, twice — some would say thrice if Brexit is included. Yet he is still around after a personal bout with the Virus and had AstraZeneca give humanity hope. That he is now stuck with another, even deadlier version only goes to prove that somewhere hidden in the dark vestiges of UK’s health establishment still lingered the dominating hypothesis of ‘herd immunity’ which tended to drive policy on Covid. Trumpian reflex was total denial. This one aimed at some smart socioeconomic engineering. In all likelihood it may have only helped Covid mutate into greater resilience. In the meanwhile AstraZeneca and cohorts will help millions others across the world.
Perhaps there cannot be but Covid the only reference to 2020. Mankind was put to its sternest test of the last 100 years when human race was threatened by a microbe that beat technology and innovation to reign supreme for a while. The pandemic touched the entire world varying in intensity but entailed a cost in blood and treasure everywhere. No world wars, no nuclear weapons, nor chemical asphyxiation, a microbe enters undetected and takes control of the human body disabling all organs one by one, ultimately drowning people to their death. Mankind learnt how helpless it was before the tiniest of the living being which could neither be seen or heard nor smelt. God returned in a big way in 2020.
China and Xi didn’t help either. So wayward and exotic has man turned in his cuisines and cultures that it borders on the outrageous. So unnatural had man become in his habits and in his lifestyles that it warped nature’s balance to the extremes. Mother Nature doesn’t take that lightly. It was inevitable that balance will be restored. Populations have multiplied, the cities are denser and the intermixing complicated and complex and way out of harmony in how the planet was intended. In this battle, Mother Nature reasserted her control. If it weren’t for such tragic and widespread loss it would have been appropriate to term it nature’s spring cleaning. There are many goods ascribed to the rise of modern China but the race to affluence lost sight of nature’s imperative for proportion. It may thus be now that China will reconsider its engineering of social behaviours. Climate will be the next frontier after this microbe has been tamed. How humanity addresses that challenge will determine if more or severer mutations of destructive organisms and events will impose the certainty of God’s ways.
Closer to home we trundled from one revelation to the next and finally with God’s grace found a saving formula to bide our way through the pandemic. Without a doubt we were dealt an easier hand and a friendlier climate to keep the spread of the disease in control but a society stuck in the basics also meant a society saved from the outlandish. That saved us devastation though individual losses were as big. It also dealt its own set of problems like lack of discipline but the ingrained hardiness became a blessing to contain the damage. From initial flirtation with the idea of herd immunity to various forms of qualified lockdowns meant we had adapted to give each stage of the pandemic challenge a reasonable name and a narrative. What underwrote partial face-saving came by way of minimal damage and resort to organisational efficiency which enabled timely decisions and a reasonable chance to implement those with some assurance. Cumulatively that helped cut our losses even if science and data were the farthest in guiding us through the challenge.
Politics too made 2020 look shoddy and unraveling. Globally governments and their guiding philosophies, conservative to ultra-conservative to liberal to neoliberal, simply wilted under the weight of the Covid microbe. More than systems leaders and their leadership was tested. Only a few were saved blushes and that had more to do with how the societies were structured and how quickly they adapted to emergent nature of the disease. If Taiwan or South Korea became early examples of efficient management of the crisis they are now reeling under the weight of Covid’s second iteration. Trump, who almost succeeded in unraveling the United States and the global democratic order — giving greater credence to right-wing authoritarianism — also succumbed to the weight of mis-governance imposed by the virus and its dastardly consequences. His replacement Joseph Biden will have his job cut as he enters office to restore life and order and control the pandemic as indeed reestablish faith in a global order and the notion of democracy as a viable governing system which has answers to newer challenges. The world needs another covenant and structures under it to secure the human race against novel threats.
At home another kind of political turmoil ruled the roost. In fact and in many ways it brought out the ugly face of the populist dispensations which were only nominally democratic. A callously exploitative political order feeds the elites in mutual sustenance even as it keeps the masses deprived and ill-provisioned. That way power elites keep control of a third-world nation and a fourth-world society arrogating nauseous control of resource to themselves which they ruthlessly misappropriate for personal, familial and tribal benefit in odious contrast to the needs of the hopelessly neglected majority. How will Pakistani politics square this corner, if ever, will decide how well or poorly will this state be able to respond to gathering storms. Covid only bared these shameful distortions.
Through this all there were nations and people who were at work to find the world a remedy and a vaccine to re-establish the indomitability of the human spirit especially against challenges which threaten mankind’s existence. That humanity learnt to cope with a microbe and survive its relentless biological wrath says a lot about the human instinct to survive. Technologies such as CRISPR enable humans greater power and understanding enabling a capacity to modify the genome to eliminate disease in the future forever marrying humans to technology and science in complementary coexistence. Where science is trashed tragedy happens. This is yet another lesson from the year to take forward. And even as we begin to vaccinate the human race over the next couple of years against the deadly Covid we will need to cast our net wide in global cooperation to detect deviations in planetary balance and adjust lifestyles and cultures to forge greater harmony among all elements.
Mother Nature created the planet in a delicate balance demanding proportion and coexistence. When man is callous to this calling Mother Nature intercedes in a devastating way — storms, cyclones, floods or ravaging droughts, all mix with biological mutations assaulting the unnatural. Year 2020 has left this lasting lesson in no uncertain way. Will man heed? He can dismiss it only at its peril. Tragedies aside, of which there were far too many — only in the US lives lost were twice as many for any given year — 2020 was a year of rediscovery, of human adaptability and innovation and of surviving the odds. Human indomitability will be the final ode to a year which tested and pained millions. Hope still prevails.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 27th, 2020.
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