Thinking about a lot of things these days. (There’s not much else to do, all things considered.) To be perfectly honest, I am not generally someone who worries a lot about the future; by disposition, I have always been relatively easygoing and flexible—except when the things I truly believe in are threatened. I am also, unfortunately, very much an idealist. Those few traits, combined, have meant that I’ve had an increasingly difficult time comprehending the unprecedented (and still worsening) suffering that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about in the past month or so.
The world has changed so much in just the span of a few weeks that it has at times left me overwhelmed, not because of any major changes in my own life, but because I worry so much about the state of others’ lives. I spent last week on edge, finding myself repeating “are you okay?” to my loved ones (and to people I barely speak to or haven’t spoken to in years) like a broken tape recorder, before realising that I hadn’t really processed my own thoughts and feelings about the pandemic.
Normally, I prefer not to share my worries, not even with my closest friends and family; I just prefer privacy. But I felt it important, somehow, to share these few reflections that I have on the sheer impact that the pandemic has had (and will continue to have) on our lives.
I offer neither solutions nor predictions; that is not my intention with this post. It is simply meant to provide some food for thought for each of us as we stay home these next few months.
Privilege
Covid-19 has supposedly levelled the playing field, grabbing each one of us by the collar and forcing us to confront the inevitability of our own mortality. And yet it has also unveiled the grotesque and (hitherto relatively invisible) inequalities that we’ve created amongst ourselves as a human race, drawing lines in the dying earth to assign value and meaning to individual lives, based on indicators as fleeting and arbitrary as social status and income. The rich and privileged shelter in their mansions and their holiday homes, with their home offices and their sprawling yards, and wonder what could be so hard about staying home, while the destitute huddle together in their over-crowded dormitories, their one-room flats, and their cardboard-box beds in the street.
There is something so sinister—perverse, even—about how the pandemic has revealed the insiduous-ness with which the cult of celebrity has infiltrated into our collective psyches. Did they really think that stringing together a couple of videos of themselves singing one by one, would make much of a difference to the vast majority of our lives? What is it that makes the suffering of a famous person more galvanising, more panic-inducing, more moving, and more worthy of being highlighted than the tens of thousands of fame-less others already lying immobile on their hospital beds? Is it that we have somehow come to think of celebrity and all of its trappings—adulation, vast fame, wealth—as that which render us somehow invincible to suffering at all?
True equality is a permanent pipe dream that can never truly be actualised, but it seems we have also invariably shut out equity (and its simple cousins, compassion and humanity) from the theatres of our lives.
Safety
Nobody of sound mind and heart has ever protested that the hospitals should scramble to save as many lives as possible; a human life must always be protected and preserved at all costs. Health and safety are now the most valuable possessions in the world, preserved like hidden treasures by the mere act of staying home. And yet even in the (supposed) comfort of their own homes, there are some among us for whom the preservation of physical health inevitably means the degradation of mental and emotional health.
“Lockdowns! DORSCON Red!” people demand, entirely ignorant of how they’re unwittingly condemning those amongst us from dysfunctional and abusive families to unimaginable pain. These are the ones amongst us who fear for their own safety and suffer in silence through an altogether more invisible (but no less valid) threat than their physical health. For them, there are no blaring, daily headlines to quantify their suffering; no viral anecdotes of their pain to arouse empathy in their fellow countrymen. There is simply the daily horror of waking up every day for the next few months, to being confined within the same four walls as their dogged tormentors.
Authenticity
They say these isolations, quarantines, and lockdowns that are taking place all over the world will spark an entirely new revolution; a “new normal”— that of altered lifestyles with more space and time in our lives for those who truly matter, and for a recalibration of the self, so we would all re-emerge, eventually, with a new understanding of ourselves, of each other, and of the world around us.
And yet we have all forgotten how to sit alone with ourselves behind closed doors, let alone with our loved ones. Parents thronged the toy stores the weekend before the circuit-breaker, as though the only way they know how to keep the children happy is to buy them things they probably don’t need. Netflix servers have become so overloaded that they’ve had to downgrade their video quality to accommodate the sudden immensity of traffic. Social media is awash with Instagram stories of newfangled quarantine-coffee fads, TikToks of lockdown romances, Facebook posts of adamant (and classically Singaporean) complaints about not having enough masks or masks not being well-made enough, and tweets of quarantine memes.
By and large, we cope the only way we know how to: by masking our own fears, anxieties, pain, and suffering with the stunted, saccharine-sweet smiles we’ve unconsciously learnt to put on and take off day after day, after a decade of social media practice. Online, #authenticity has been all the rage for a while now, yet we seem to have only succeeded in creating a mask of authenticity itself, and then hiding behind it from the all-too daunting task of inner work and honest self-reflection that true authenticity calls for.
Hate
Before a global pandemic shook everything up, hate was essentially that creeping, trigger-happy scourge forcing its way into our lives and our homes, whether we realised it or not.
It was that dangerously self-indulgent brand of ideological hate—sometimes intellectualised, sometimes nakedly brutish—masquerading behind scowling, self-proclaimed saviours promising to restore a bygone, hyper-romanticised age of former greatness. Their prophets spoke in the language of delusion; fashioned themselves as veritable polyglots of fear-mongering and manipulation. “We are the deserving ones, not the Others!” they screamed.
And yet in the UK, he who was the face of that hateful rhetoric now lies on an ICU hospital bed, entirely at the mercy of the very system whose powers he sought to curtail, while the Others with the strange Muslim names were the first four doctors in the country to give their lives to fighting the pandemic. In the US, he who claimed to make the country great again stands at a podium before his people, shrugging off the weight of 12,000 deaths, justifying his refusal to distribute federal stockpiles even as supplies run dangerously low all over the country, and busily pointing fingers at past administrations.
The pandemic, though no one saw it coming, has redirected fear and channeled it towards a force altogether more potent, inevitably destructive and literally life-threatening than anything else in the world: death. Ultimately, he who contemplates and mulls over the looming spectre of death, will have no room left within him for the futility of hate.
1 comment
Nice Writing San San! Love your thoughts for all the parts.
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