The WHO has declared COVID-19 a pandemic, in other words, an epidemic of global concern. They believe governments are underestimating the issue, they’re worried that the new coronavirus will continue spreading, causing the collapse of the health system, and perhaps reaching countries that wouldn’t be capable to overcome the emergency.
You must have heard of the drastic measures that Italy has taken to stop the contagion. As I wrote yesterday, these actions are necessary and scary at the same time. The whole country is on lockdown, now also the flights have been cancelled and new even more restrictive rules have been put in force. People can leave their houses only for urgencies, but they need a permit to show the police if they get stopped.
I don’t know what’s gonna happen now, but it might be just a matter of time before these measures are taken worldwide. In this scenario, I suspect that we’ll be forbidden to travel for some time. We’ll be all stuck in our countries – whether native or of adoption – and will experience for the first time some real restrictions.
We – people of the West, men and women from the so-called civilised countries – are so lucky. My generation, and a couple of generations before and after mine, have never experienced a situation like the one we’ve been living in at the minute. We’ve always been free to go wherever we wanted, when we wanted, but we’ve probably never stopped considering the importance of it.
We’ve given freedom so for granted that with these new rules, we’re all losing the plot. In Italy, for example, people are cleaning out supermarkets; some of them are even trying to escape from one region to another to avoid catching the virus, not thinking that they’re in fact helping it to spread.
We, humans, should be united before these emergencies, but too often we are not. At least I hope that this situation will teach us how to stick together. It’s the only way to win. The virus doesn’t care about colours or countries, and neither should we. We can all get infected because we’re all the same. We should learn that respecting rules is respecting others, and not only in the case of a pandemic.
We should all learn to respect other people’s lives because they count just like ours.
Now that all of us risk seeing our freedom of movement extremely reduced, I wonder if we’ll start to understand how desperate the people who live in countries torn by war and famine could be. What we are living is nothing compared to what they have to go through every day. They don’t have our cosy homes and there are no supermarkets to clean out if they’re hungry. Maybe now we can see why they pay a fortune to take a boat that could either lead them to a better future or to death.
We’re acting like crazy, and we are not even escaping from bombings; we were only asked to stay inside our comfy homes for two weeks. At this point, we might wanna reconsider a few things, especially politically speaking.
There is something wrong with this world, and it’s time to change it. How? Let’s start respecting others. We can’t go wrong with that.
© Brooxy Moon
Brooxy Moon 