This Will Be Different
You are a child. The internet is born. Suddenly, mail is sent and arrives in seconds around the world.
You grow up, you go to college. At the computer library you see an ad encouraging you to sign up on something called Facebook to reconnect with your old high school friends.
Years later, you sign up and are given your own mini website where you can upload pictures and maintain a blog about your life – all for free.
You use Facebook, you add family, friends and work colleagues. They come from every walk of life and they come from all over the world. You spend time scrolling through your feed and in so doing you sample the problems of the world. All of us, unconscious citizen reporters.
In the Philippines your friends agonize about the drug war.
In Afghanistan your friends agonize about the slow meltdown of the war economy and the continued bloodshed of the civil war.
In America your friends agonize about our divided politics.
In Europe your friends express shock and anger at the resurgence of the Far Right and politics taken straight out of Neo Nazi textbooks.
There are serious problems, all over the world. But each problem is unique and bound by geography, culture and politics. The problems of your friends in the Philippines have nothing to do with the problems of your friends in Europe or Afghanistan.
Then, one day there is news about a mysterious and troubling new virus emerging out of China. And slowly but surely all those individual issues and problems begin to drift away, replaced by one word – softly at first and then building, growing stronger – replacing and drowning everything else out:
PANDEMIC. PANDEMIC. PANDEMIC. PANDEMIC.
And now, when you browse through your feed it is everywhere and everyone is dealing with the exact same challenges. Supermarkets bought empty, streets abandoned, cities shutdown – the entire world united into one single word: VIRUS.
You ask your elders if they have seen anything like this before. They say they have not. And how could they have experienced anything like this? World War 2 shook the world but only in some places at some times.
There have been plagues before in the far pages of human history but they too wrecked havoc in some places at some times.
COVID 19 is different.
It is a product of our modern and hyper interconnected world. It enjoys the unprecedented convenience of the Jet Age. It is everywhere and all at once.
And now, thanks to Facebook we all have a front seat to the same movie (horror, drama, comedy?) playing out across our lives.
This will be different.
