Promoting Unity Amidst COVID-19

COVID-19, we should thank you for catapulting us back to planet earth and attempting to open our eyes with the harvest of our very own fruits. We entered the second decade of this still youthful millennium and yes, the not so unprecedented happened where humanity is facing a common invisible threat that has been brewing within our kettles for too many years and finally, it spilled over.

COVID-19 seems to have profoundly humbled our personal ambitions and for the moment, also slowed down our reckless behavior shown over the many years through unsustainable economics that is based on a careless attitude towards mother nature, the vessel for our very own existence. You would think we would learn from the realization process and use unity as a force to accelerate towards the necessary route to redemption. Unfortunately, to little surprise, the new status quo has revealed our tendency to alienate ourselves from each other by blindly joining the game of blame, a reckless game powered by external forces that fuel our inner fears and prejudices which ultimately cocoons us in archaic nationalistic sentiments. We then shy away from the ideals of community and drift further apart from each other like icebergs breaking from the Arctic Poles.

Thus, let us maintain and strengthen the bridges of our global village. Let us use the current difficult environment as an opportunity to demolish the roots of nationalistic mindsets that tend to promote barriers of racial hatred built on ignorance. Let us flourish by living a life full of empathy and inclusion. Let us encourage each other to demolish the concrete walls of exclusion, the boundary walls that would ultimately intimidate those attempting to scale it. Let us abandon the thought that our neighbors are antagonists in this unfamiliar story line and abandon the shackles of alienation.

Can we overcome these fears together and plant the seeds of trust and understanding? Can we eliminate the weeds of mistrust and the denunciation of the unknown? Or can we abolish the long stemmed idea that some animals are more equal than others?

I remain determined and hopeful.

Besjon V.