Human Being, Nature and Covid -19
Nature is the third character in this war between Covid and the Human Being. Besides being the winner of this struggle, it teaches us that, in order not to succumb, we must live following its example.
We hear everywhere that we are at war. And like every self-respecting war, the war between the Human Being and Covid19 has different points of view. At least two, because normally there are two people involved in a war.
On one side there is the Human Being, a strange mammal that has colonized the Planet without asking permission. He must defend himself, avoid succumbing. In essence, he must find a way to save himself from the attack of the enemy, the Covid-19, aka Coronavirus. The latter, plays the other side: attack to reproduce and win its battle. So the Human Being, while counting the victims, tries to neutralize Mr. Covid, before the opposite happens. In addition, Human Being pretends he doesn’t know where Coronavirus came from. So far, nothing strange, but it is clear that both have their good reasons for surviving.
On the one hand, Covid only wants to continue reproducing himself (at our expense, of course). On the other, Human Being wants more. Indeed, not only does he want to survive, he also wants to win this battle, to go back to doing exactly what he was doing before. Therefore, every day, Human Being adopts new rules: social distancing, quarantine, hygiene, compliance. So a new everyday life, imposed on the people by governments, that in a more or less imaginative way express (perhaps) winning recipes. In short, these are the weapons that at the moment the Human Being has to fight the war. And so, we find ourselves fighting every day boasting new knowledge: today virologists, tomorrow politicians, then statisticians. Maybe, victims.
However, there is a rule that in this game of parties the Human Being has never wanted or knew how to take into consideration: knowing how to wait. And it is perhaps the only weapon used by a third character who enters the scene, Nature. It’s surprisingly wins this fight, like a soldier standing on the riverbank, waiting for the corpses of his enemies to pass by.
This third character stands there, waiting. As the war goes on, with small but significant steps, Nature is taking back what the Human Being with time had ripped away from it. Lesson is clear: we have already lost this war. Not against Mr. Covid, that wouldn’t be fair and it mustn’t happen. But we’ve lost to Nature. For istance, we continue to lose in every dolphin that returns to a bay, in every stream that purifies, in every ozone hole that shrinks, in every city that sees the level of pollution collapse.
Perhaps, at the end of it all, we’ll be able to defeat Mr Covid and those who come after it. Hence, with every battle won, we will take a step forward, towards the awareness that we are losing the war against Nature. A war that isn’t desired by Nature, that hasn’t asked us but won’t lose. Fortunately, it is teaching us to accept our inevitable role as losers. And I, this time, have never been happy to lose a war.
NZIRIA Team Home