How Covid-19 changed the concept of

“security and safety”

The world always seemed always busy, thriving with the noise of car horns or the
churning of metal cogs in factories. It remained a place where everyone was
preoccupied within their own bubble; be it families not conversing with each
other, friends failing to maintain their friendship, humans failing to care for their
less fortunate fellow. We were like this because we felt relatively safe; we
believed we could post phone a meetup with friends to a later date, pray and
worship God when we get old, give some family time on the weekends because
we felt secure enough to believe that we would have “some other time” as death
was still far away. This perception was created as there was no fear of war as
there had been not for a few decades; there was no fear of famine as there had
been not for a few decades; there was no submission to death by any predictable
and inevitable phenomenon however we had missed one mighty factor out, our
susceptibility to the elephant in the room; disease.
We had not built up our defenses because the modern system had never
experienced such (insert cool word). Humankind had invented larger than life
machines, weapons of mass destruction, tanks, heavy metal containment bunkers
just to protect ourselves from the “ourselfs” but they were of no use preventing a
non-living microbe from entering and thriving in the bodies of presidents and
peasants alike. Our modern human until last year could not have imagined that
the entire world would be screeched to a halt by a microbe organism that weighs
in total less than 2 grams. We never had this up on our agenda (except for Bill
Gates) just as Clinton never imagined Al-Qaeda posing a serious threat to the
world order, at his time other issues out shadowed this one be it the China’s
growing supremacy as a communist superpower or Germany’s regainment of
political dominance in Europe (prompting a third world war) or even the
aftermath of the breakup of the soviet union. Such was the case now when we
were indulged in Immigration politics, Climate Change or the Taliban peace deal
because these were the threats we faced before, not a Global Pandemic.
The point is that we believed that we were relatively safe while we were more
vulnerable than ever; but isn’t life like that? One might ask. Yes, we are always
vulnerable, you never know when a black cat crosses your path and that might be
your strike out.
Nonetheless, when we have tamed two of humanity’s largest predators, we must
conquer the next one and that is what we should work on in the future. Yes, it
would take time, it might lead to creation of new diseases but new diseases might
not really be bad, when we entered the atomic stage everyone thought that it
was the beginning of an era of mass slaughter but in reality, it was only the end.
When we discovered ways to engineer our food, it took us decades but we got
there and just like that we might as well end our last weakness to a predictable
early death.