Can the world ever unite? A pandemic should unite theoretically all nations and humanity as one. Instead, we have only massive fights at almost every level. In India, the entire narrative fixes around the central pole of our PM. The haters hold him responsible for every single evil in the country including the cat which lapped up their milk or the abusive drunk in their neighbourhood. The lovers make it a point to inform that Modi is responsible for the butterfly looking beautiful in their gardens. The pandemic has overwhelmed all the countries in the world (except perhaps China). People in the western world are also rebelling against instructions and causing problems for the governments by holding public parties without masks. Vaccination shortage is acute even in the western world. Without exonerating our government which took the extremely foolish step of conducting elections across the country which no political party, media, intellectuals, or the judiciary (perhaps in summer vacation) bothered to oppose, these are just desperate times for the world.
This is a time when we should have risen above the need for making money at every level (vegetable sellers inflating their prices; hospitals raising their charges; journalists selling shocking photographs for big money; pharma companies making huge profits; crooks selling fake medicines; individuals in black market schemes) or from the desperate desire for power.
Only two threats could have possibly dissolved borders and joined humanity as one: a pandemic or an extra-terrestrial threat (meteors, asteroids, and maybe aliens too). We have lost the first opportunity; perhaps the second undesired option remains the only hope. Carl Sagan said that we should always strive to become a two-planet species because the frail human mind does not have the intellectual and emotional capacity to protect itself and the Earth indefinitely. We need a back-up. Another scientist says, our Earth may have reached this stage of civilization many times before. At a crucial stage of nuclear development, humans or their equivalents endowed with similar kinds of brains might have simply blown themselves up. Our combined nuclear power has the capacity to destroy humanity and all living life many times over. But, a small corner of the human mind still allows us to live with some optimism as everyone seems to be fighting just about everyone else and solutions become new questions.
RANDOM MUSINGS 