Yet another kind of scourge

Subject: Yet another scourge.

How to change lanes from the fast to the slow as we decelerate once again. The threat of little or no income will cause us to reduce our spend, only buying the necessities and closing our eyes to the rest.  The pub the restaurant, the theatre and the club life will be put on hold as a series of predetermined steps are brought into play to provide an envelope under which we can shelter. It will require courage to conform. It will take empathy as the population are withered and torn by unemployment. The spectre of food banks and the grubbiness of making do is getting ever closer. It will increase the  differentiation within society with many who are even now putting a brave face on life by just getting by but soon, unable to earn even a meagre living as they bear the extra weight of being unemployed they will inevitably crumble.

Those who were planning for tomorrow have now the dilemma of wondering if there will be a tomorrow, the mind reprogrammed to accept the unpalatable truth that things may never be the same again. Our employment threatened, our children's future threatened, the relationships with others threatened, all has the fragrance of a war psychosis, of a country at war through our own short sightedness.

The 'wet markets' in china where live animals are traded, not necessarily as food but for erotic purposes is the place where the virus skipped species. In its natural habitat in and amongst bats  is unseen and it has this enormous reservoir of carriers to live and mutate  and having mutated it learnt how to skip the barriers which evolution placed as protection.

Emotionally there's no end to the destruction, how ever slight of the confidence we once had in each other. We now see a stranger, a friend, even member of our own family as a potential threat, so contagious is the virus. What damage might this do to our psyche as we hesitate to embrace or show affection. How will our motivation to travel and meet people, even make love be effected by the R factor.

Of course we came through the 'Bubonic Plague', the Spanish Flue , Smallpox and so no doubt the resilience of our species will come through this. Early death from any cause in the population in the 1800s was common as it was in era of the Spanish flue in 1913 the Depression of 1933 and two ghastly World wars which alone killed a combined total of over 100 million but in today's more sensitive society which must have answers and someone to blame we are less able to put aside calamity and take responsibility for what we can. With cultural assumptions of longevity and our right to be protected we a less equipped than previous generations to overcome this particular scourge.