A Ship without a Captain

A second wave of COVID-19 is growing internationally, nationally and provincially. Regionally cases are on the rise as well, which stands to reason. No one is immune to this virus or its insidious impact on day-to-day living but some are experiencing its consequence far more severely than others, so far.

 As with most storms, until folks are actually in the eye of it and experiencing its full force and impact, they do not respect it, even if they do fear it. Some will mock and jeer it. Some will cower and be crippled by it. Some will defy it and run out to confront it. Human responses to conflict are pretty predictable in that respect; they’re not all the same, unless and until uniformity and conformity is encouraged, enforced and sustained by the majority of those folks in any given society.

 That’s where Law arises as a tool to make as many as possible decide that being as much the same and behaving as much the same as possible is in everyone’s best interests. Those would be the Group Rights that have increasingly been challenged and minimized by the birth of Individual Rights in the past several decades and their expansion.

 Those Individual Rights are now challenged once more by the need for conformity to Group Rights interests and the clash between them is the David & Goliath struggle of our Age; precipitated in large part by a pandemic that can kill millions of folks indiscriminately if not checked and make both sets of ‘Rights’ completely mute.

 I won’t be here in 50 years but I would like to know how it all turns out. At a time when new cases and deaths are rising internationally, nationally and provincially as a second wave begins to unfold and gain momentum, political leadership is encouraging re-opening the economy, sending folks back to work and children into classrooms within the next couple of months.

 I see a perfect storm brewing and a lot of imperfect leaders putting on their blinders. Will they be held accountable for crimes against humanity if they are, by these choices now, sending the masses to slaughter? How will those masses cope if the health care system, the education system and the supply chains collapse just as the summer ends and we all start heading into the fall and winter seasons again? I certainly hope the Harvest is a good one this year!

 There is a large gap in the messaging between what I am seeing and reading from international bodies like the WHO and what my federal and provincial government leaders are messaging, and I am not okay with that. The interests of the Greater Good deserve better!

 If the economy needs shutting down and basic incomes distributed for 2 years, so be it. IMO that will still be far less costly for the rich and far less divesting for the masses of poor in the long-run than losing a significant percentage of the total work-force in coming months and all of the knowledge, skills and experience they possess with them for coming decades.

 It feels today like I’m on a ship with no Captain tacking into a very imperfect storm.