The three Cs

Soon after my second Covid-19 shot, I received an email from a dear friend who I had been remiss in contacting, asking how I was coping with, as she put it, ‘the three Cs’ – the Covid-19 pandemic, the coup attempt at the Capitol, and the climate crisis.

Donald Trump, and Donald Trump alone, was responsible for most of the calamity inflicted on us by these three Cs here in the US – his negligence and incompetency in handling the pandemic led to thousands of preventable deaths, his turgid fascism resulted in an attack on the country’s seat of democracy, and his pompous ignorance and denial of science exacerbated the climate crisis.

He is now out of the White House. But what is ahead of us – where do we go from here?

The world’s leading scientists have long been speculating about the post-pandemic world. Experts in fields ranging from psychiatric epidemiology and business administration to urban planning and medicine have been sharing their insights on how we shop, work, socialise and seek medical care may change after the pandemic.

Many from the social sciences have rightly warned of a possible rise of totalitarian surveillance and xenophobic isolationism due to the pandemic. Others from STEM fields have painted a much brighter picture of the post-pandemic world, pointing to the public’s renewed respect for and trust in scientists who recommended effective measures to slow the spread of the virus, quickly sequenced its genome, and within a few months developed multiple vaccines against it.

Such speculations warning or reassuring us are meant for us to imagine a saner and more liveable future for the world at large. But their scope is constrained by the disciplinary formations they stem from, as well as the economic, business, social and public health parameters we know or hope to achieve in the near future.

Another factor that puts any speculation on the ‘post-pandemic normal’ into question is the innate propensity of humans to forget and move on. The pandemic will undoubtedly have its own long chapter in history books, but those books are already filled with many horrors humans have experienced and rushed to forget and move on with business as usual.

I for one am not convinced there actually will be a ‘post-pandemic world’. Something deep in our collective global psyche has been affected that even a wilful determination to forget will not soon eradicate the physical and mental consequences of this first truly global experience. This pandemic was a wakeup call for those who are still in denial of climate calamities that keep showing their signs from the fires of California to the snows of Texas. Something is seriously off-kilter in the unfolding enormity of our worldly and cosmic experiences.

Trump’s “Space Force” must have started long before and will unfurl long after him. We need not just to rethink but drastically scale back.

Excerpted: ‘Small is still beautiful: Prospects of a post-pandemic world’

Aljazeera.com