There are moments in life when we become aware of our fragility, when we can feel very strongly how old securities disappear and we are left with the impression that the world we know can cease to exist in a matter of hours.
That happened to me in the difficult times of the pandemic. Until then I was certain that I lived in a relatively safe world where technology had the level to solve any problem.
However, when the first information began to arrive about a microorganism that had taken us by surprise and that could wipe out our species, I felt a great uncertainty. I was not prepared for such an event capable of paralyzing the way of life we knew.
In my country there were certain conditions that minimized the damage of the pandemic. We lived in times of great economic hardship, so people had no money to move from one place to another. In addition, there was a severe shortage of gasoline; it was hard to get a few liters to fill up the tank. All of that kept us pretty isolated, so the pandemic spread very slowly and gave us time to get the vaccines.
By the time of the pandemic I had already been retired for several years, I went out very little, I did almost all my routines close to home and I dedicated myself to writing things on the Internet. So I was not very affected by the mobility restrictions imposed by the authorities.
I did worry about the situation of my children who live in Spain, there the impact was much greater and their way of life was very altered, my granddaughters stopped going to school and my children stopped going to their jobs. It was hard for them.
In those days I had two great losses, one was my father, he got sick during the first months of the pandemic. At that time the medical care protocol gave priority to the care of young people. So my father died practically without medical attention in very pitiful conditions, aggravated by the long electricity rationing we had, the absence of domestic gas, and a great lack of medicines.
Another who did not resist the onslaught of the disease was our dear Nonna, my sister-in-law's mother. She was always a very special woman, affectionate and cheerful, with a way of speaking, a mixture of Italian and Spanish, in which there were times when she could not find the right word and ended up blurting out phrases in both languages.
That feeling of fragility experienced in those years has not completely left me. I feel that our world has serious problems that we do not fully understand and therefore we do not agree on how to face them.
One of them is climate change. I live in a tropical area where the effects are very evident. There are areas where the rains have changed their regularity, they come many months earlier, rivers overflow, landslides occur and cause a lot of damage.
The opposite also happens, periods of drought last longer than usual and then there are voracious fires that destroy the forests and leave the land bare, which facilitates landslides.
Another big problem that seems to me to have increased after the pandemic is the weakness of Democracy as a way of life. In many countries Democracy is in retreat, people have begun to favor authoritarian leaders looking to them for the solutions they have not found. Betting on authoritarianism can have serious consequences.
But the pandemic also left us great lessons of solidarity, in fact, it could be contained thanks to the consensus of many people around the world. I like to think that this spirit of solidarity will eventually prevail and we will be able to face all the challenges of the present moment.
I am publishing this post motivated by the initiative proposed by my friend @ericvancewalton, Memoir Monday, in the forty night week. For more information click on the link.
Thanks for your time.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Logo creado por @themanualbot