The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.
by Ralph Jemmott
I found myself awake at 3.a.m. feeling quite depressed and wondering what it was that I was going through. I realised that I was not just depressed because invariably I can trace my depressions to some specific problem.
No, I was actually experiencing a sense of being ‘confounded.’ The cause of my anxiety was not a single issue but a combination of circumstances, most not of my own making and not within my control.
We live in a confounding world and we are almost all affected by it in one way or another, in the mind, the spirit and sometimes in the body. Here are some of the things that confound.
I can’t believe that I am living through a plague. Like the Black Death in the Middle Ages, COVID-19 hangs like pall over the entire planet. It has already killed millions and threatens to kill millions more.
It has affected our children’s schooling and their futures in ways we may not imagine and it threatens our economic viability.
For a while we appeared to be in control, but with six deaths in seven days and over 800 persons in isolation, Barbados is now experiencing a cascading crisis of COVID.
Community spread has become a frightening reality.
Dr. Corey Forde’s conversation on CBC TV on Sunday, September 12 was an eye-opener. We ignore his advice at our peril. With the rising number of cases we are developing a plague mentality, scornful and distrustful of others. This damages normative sociability, leaving the individual feeling more isolated and psychologically more vulnerable.
In the winter of life, morbidity and the death of family members, friends and acquaintances affects us very deeply, making us painfully conscious of our own mortality. In the space of two weeks, one learns that two friends are terminally ill. One has since passed. George was one of the better sorts.
He was pleasant, interesting to talk with, always full of ideas and perspectives. I called a Winnipeg, Manitoba friend and yearly visitor to Barbados on her 79th birthday.
She informed me that she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer which had gone to the bone. If she does not take chemotherapy she may die in four months, with treatment a year and a half.
She advised that we might not see her in Barbados again.
We were looking forward to seeing her in 2022 after not seeing her and her friend for the last two years. We know that we are mortal, but how does one deal with the immediacy of what novelist John Updike calls, ‘the stubborn fact of Death.’ A few days ago the average temperature on planet Earth reached 50 degrees Celsius. I must admit that I have until now not been terribly concerned with environmental matters.
Why worry about my carbon footprint when factories in China, India and the North Atlantic are belching gasses into the atmosphere.
However, recent global events are terrifying, floods, forest fires, volcanic activity and the prospect of more frequent and more damaging hurricane activity make one wonder if our planet is not already in serious peril. In this regard, human existence also seems increasingly precarious.
Another circumstance that recently confounded us was the victory of the Taliban and the West’s ignominious retreat from Afghanistan, historically recognised as ‘the graveyard of empires’. What will be the consequence? Will there be a return to executions in the football stadium in Kabul, the beheading of anyone suspected of being an infidel and the suppression of women? What threat will mass migration of Afghan refugees into western states present? What is the prospect for the survival of the western values? The threat to Western civilisation is not Islam but militant Islam which now operates in many countries.
There is Al-Qaeda, the so-called Caliphate of Isis, Al-Shabab in Somalia, Boko Haram in NigerIa and Jamat Islamiyah in Indonesia. As Tony Blair stated on Fareed Zakaria GPS, militant Islam is “a totalitarian political ideology based on religion”.
It has the cogency of religious myth as well as the force of political organisation. It could overwhelm a West weakened by materialism, hedonism, excessive liberalism and painfully unsure of its own underlying values.
An overarching philosophical concern that confounds is the question of what constitutes truth. A recent edition of the RSA journal notes that in a time of fear and uncertainty conspiracy theories fill the void. Nothing has spawned more conspiracies than COVID-19 itself.
Did the virus originate from a bat or was it accidentally or deliberately leaked from a lab in Wuhan China? Is the 5G network helping to spread it? Is mass vaccination a plot by Bill Gates to plant controlling microchips in our brains or by Big Pharma to rob us blind? Then there is the Big Lie.
Donald J. Trump was maliciously cheated out of the U.S Presidency in 2020 and Joseph Biden is not a legitimate President. In April of 2021 some 70 per cent of republicans believed the Big Lie.
In spite of all the evidence, today an amazing 76 per cent supports it. It was Jose Ortega y Gassett who wrote of ‘the unruly torrents of life.’ Today life seems more unruly and torrentuous than most living today can recall. Not surprising then that we all are a bit confounded.
Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.
