Holy Days

This time of confinement brings with it a period for intimate reflection, while rivers of ink flow, as well as hoaxes and fake news about whether or not SARSCoV2 was created in a laboratory ( most of them point to China, curiously) or it is rather a product of nature (some even see it as a divine punishment).  

Beyond the implications that the coronavirus will have in the international arena, in the regional reconfiguration and, of course, in the internal spectrum of each country, it will be necessary to take a look at ourselves as individuals and what the collective face of a society will be like, which, in the interests of public health and preserving life, will have to (accept or give up by force) its own freedom. 

Our lives will be tracked, if we already knew or suspected that in the Information Society the use of digital technologies and all the tools available in social networks would end up devouring us in a Big Brother with our intimacy exposed and at the mercy of cybernetic intruders; Under the pretext of the coronavirus, the governments of several countries in the world have been lifting their respective confinements to initiate a GPS tracking of the movements of each citizen and thus have a log that allows them to know what their movements are and the people they have met with -in case it was necessary to decide their isolation- to cut off the transmission of the COVID-19.  

That will be part of our immediate reality: controlled movements and living under the psychosis of temperature taking in airports, train stations as well as exhaustive inspections with endless forms in order to access another country and be welcomed at its borders as human beings and not as pests.  

Because the coronavirus turns us into hostile people, anguished by our individual health, to preserve our life above any other need; and it builds selfishness by making us fearful because the invisible enemy is out there and it is transmitted from person to person. 

Because if we thought we had all the reasons to discriminate anyone else, the coronavirus now provides us with another pretext to, in short, become even more hurtful.

We are witnessing this in the same health crisis with neighbours who avoid others as soon as they know that they have fallen ill with the coronavirus and have even overcome the disease, but the simple fact of knowing that they were infected or that they could be re-infected and spread the disease is an obstacle to not getting any closer; in these ominous days we have also heard of embarrassing cases of people being expelled from their own homes - from rented accommodation shared with other people - as soon as they develop the symptoms of the disease. 

It hurts as much as it did the day that fifty residents of La Línea de la Concepción in Cádiz stoned a convoy of old people suffering from coronavirus; this cursed virus has stripped away the worst that human beings hide under the daily custom of an everyday life that is no longer such.

The coronavirus brings out what each society is under the Gordian knot of its vices, lacks and passions; of its frustrations, fears and hatreds... perched on the nervous feeling of subsisting and surviving barricaded in our own houses; in the United States, its inhabitants ran wildly to exhaust arms and ammunition that, along with toilet paper, swept away all stocks. Homo homini lupus. 

Toilet paper has become a handbook for therapists and psychologists, catapulted -due to its unusual demand- into a first-rate input: its lack of supply (because we have accumulated more and more) reveals our deepest fears, that we would be forbidden to leave our homes for days -not even to go to the supermarket- due to the threat of the virus being transmitted and remaining in the air. We imagined ourselves in our house turned into a kind of bunker in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

Less freedom, more fear, much more discrimination, more people in their personal bubble and ostracism gaining ground to the collective; individualism in the middle of a survival reasoning will create a less supportive and more selfish way of life; this virus will cause more enclosed societies with less desire to socialize and more devoted to live their parallel worlds and social network friendships. 

There is no doubt about it. We will consume more technology in our bubble, whatever keeps us safe in our bunker houses where we will spend more time after work because normality will not return to our lives anymore, not at all; the coronavirus is leaving deep scars.  

As governments prepare to control us and the big technology companies are ready to show us why 5G fiber will save our poor lives. 

Will we be shadows of ourselves? There is no absolute truth, although I believe we will readjust our dreams, shape our goals and re-order our scale of priorities. What the coronavirus has taught us is that, for death, there are neither rich nor poor, neither more nor less developed countries, and that suffering is the same for everyone without distinction.