The effects of the Coronavirus go beyond the huge numbers of
victims who lost their lives with no reason whatsoever, with no purpose and
obviously before they could do many things they were planning the year before,
the month before, and maybe even the week before.
The effects go beyond the unnecessary suffering of millions
of people who were in pain laying on hospital beds or screaming at their homes
not knowing what hit them, and the cries and heartache of those who watched
what was happening to their loved ones, not being able to do anything to help relieve
their pain. The effects caused a great deal of damage to our civilization as a
whole.
The closed stores and restaurants and coffee shops, the
total lockdown in cities that never knew what that word even meant only days
before it happened, the empty schools and universities and public parks and
squares that were points of gathering and learning and playing and simply
enjoying a sunny day for each and every person, no matter where they lived or
what language they spoke, or which religion they believed or did not believe in,
all were results that none of us could have even imagined in their wildest
nightmares, and even though we have seen similar scenes in a number of films,
we always thought they were only a crazy man’s fantasy.
The point that we are forced to wear masks all the time, harmed
us in more than one of our basic human elements; the ability to recognize each
other’s faces, and to know whom you are talking to, to relate to his/her facial
expressions, to understand what they mean even without words being spoken,
simply by looking at their face, to understand if someone is happy, sad, angry,
calm, excited, or even bitter; this is also gone. One of the main instruments
of human interaction and relationships just disappeared, now suddenly we cannot
express ourselves by using gestures, we cannot smile at anything, we cannot
smile at all, and if we do, no one is there to see it, to interpret our
movement of the lips, to understand that we are talking seriously or making an
innocent joke. The famous phrase: “lovers understand each other without words”
is gone forever. You must use different methods to recognize your brother and sister,
your friend, your colleague, and maybe your parents and spouse; methods other
than how ‘they look’, you must know what they wear, how they walk, what their
hair styles are like each time you meet them. All of a sudden, the spoken
language is, again, the only way of communication; explicit direct words, are
how everyone else can understand what you mean when you want to communicate anything.
The virus didn’t only put entire nations to their knees, and
ruin what human kind has achieved in hundreds of years in terms of
interpersonal relations and community life traditions of cooperation and “lending
a hand” to each other whenever needed, it also taught us an important lesson,
it showed us how insignificant and small we are; it made us see that no matter how
big the weapons we built, and which plans we had against one another, no one is
safe from the wrath of nature and the rage of our planet.
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