COVID-19 and Hope for a Compassionate Future

By Jan LundiusSTOCKHOLM / ROME, Apr 9 2020 (IPS) The Coronavirus, COVID-19, makes its deadly round across the world. People fall sick and die, communities and entire nations end up in its deadly grip and try to cope with it. Everything is changing, and changing fast and we all have to deal with it together, even if many of us are being physically apart. Humans are social beings. Our mental and physical capacities are created around that fact and crave for support and compassion. Some of us benefit from social security, relative wealth, access to health care and a home of our own, others lack all of this. COVID-19 brings already existing social ills and inequalities to the surface. The general and the personal are getting mixed up. A collective state of mind becomes part of our intimate sphere of existence. While an imposed quarantine isolates us from others, we become subjects to conflicting information, wild rumours, and apocalyptic prophesies, combined with an awareness of the injustice of unequal suffering and worries about what the future might hold in store. What happens to our bodies affect our minds, and vice versa. We might feel as we are awake within a nightmare, a state of mind that has been described by several imaginative authors. In Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Year of Solitude the plague comes to the small town of Maconde, which in Márquez’s novel serves as an archetype for countless other Latin American rural towns. However, this plague is not a...
Source: IPS Inter Press Service - Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Global Headlines Health Humanitarian Emergencies Natural Resources TerraViva United Nations Source Type: news