#BTEditorial – Let good go viral

“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt – Inaugural address; March 4, 1933.

Cometh the hour cometh a nation.

Crises, whether personal, communal or national, have a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. The very best and very worst of our behaviours are writ large for all to see who we really are when the proverbial chips are down.

In a disaster, we are given a choice – often a difficult one – to be either selfish or selfless, a nation of takers or givers. Our true self-image is a product not of success but of adversity.

In this virus crisis, we’ve been forced to come to grips with who we really are or must be. The hoarding and panic-buying; the price-gouging; the knee-jerk scoffing at sound public health advice; the preference for gossip; the penchant for sharing unverified tweets and posts over cold hard facts; disdain for institutions; and downright greed, avarice, meanness and cynicism – all may yet be the epitaph of a nation so consumed by negativity that it perished well before a disease took hold.

We, humans, have been this way before; 600 years ago, plague and pestilence filled the vacuum of thoughtfulness, mindfulness and reason.

Or we could choose to chart a different course. We may even begin to look at the silver linings and sunnier horizons beyond the dark clouds of despair and disease.

At a personal, social, and political level, we must be prepared to reach deep within ourselves and pull out not the worst, but the very best of who we are.

Take, for example, our elusive food security. Perhaps now, very now, we may begin to rely upon ourselves to feed ourselves as the planes stop flying and the ships stop sailing from the north.

Perhaps now we can take a more serious look at the breadbaskets large and small closer to home, from Suriname to St Vincent to Dominica. And 700-odd acres of Barbadian land lying dormant may indeed become a new and permanent land of plenty.

Perhaps now, rather than depend upon laden cruise ships and packed planes for our daily bread, we could begin to pin our economic destiny on opportunities for sustainable growth. We may yet find new areas for self-reliance in science and technology and in homegrown research and development.

In our places of worship, we may yet to see the wisdom of temporary social distancing preventing against permanent loss of parishioners at highest risk of a virus’s lethality, and not as an excuse to avoid darkening the door of a church, mosque or temple.

We may even begin to be proud of ourselves. satisfied that for once our leaders at all levels have acted not in narrow personal regard but in the public interest.

Perhaps, ‘We the People’ will be our legacy to those who survive us – assuming we do what is necessary to survive a viral onslaught.

For Christians, the current season of Lent is an opportunity for reflection and self-assessment, a chance to take fresh guard, arm ourselves against the sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.

But perhaps now in the solitude that is pending for many in self-quarantine, we can find a moment to be at peace with ourselves as a people.

Mass gatherings of more than 100 people may be put off but we should not postpone our attention to the stranger or care for the elderly relative in our midst. And the friend in need is a friend indeed.

Capitalism is a funny creature. Even as the orthodoxy dictates that the market must be free to pursue its maximum value, there remain built-in safeguards, safety valves and circuit breakers when the market begins to fail.

We have seen stock markets suspend trading, stimulus packages being announced and bailouts of industries being promised. There appears finally a grudging acceptance that many of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society stand to suffer most in this crisis.

Perhaps these events will encourage us to take a holiday from an economy. For what economic recovery is possible if thousands are sickened and dying? What would be the point of Gross Domestic Product in the light of a gross domestic tragedy?

Perhaps, then the solution may be found in these words which, to repeat a phrase of the age more apt than ever before, ought to ‘go viral’

Attributed to an English translation by one Kitty O’Meara, but said to have been thought and expressed by a journalist in Italy, whose elderly population is currently being decimated by the COVID-19 disease, the words we leave you to ponder:

“And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.

“And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

“And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.”