With each crisis that the world faces – each generation defining crisis that is put in our path to challenge us, to teach us, to unite us, we work through and push past with a pledge to “Never forget”. And yet we do.

The crisis becomes familiar. The crisis becomes acceptable.

We become bored.

COVID-19. It just seems to go on and on and on and on…

For over two years now, Mother Nature has been looking each and every one of us across the global community straight in the eyes, spending her limitless time and energy to teach us to come together as a true ‘community’,

how to work together,

how to solve a problem that has us all bonded together in fragility, in fear, in hope,

how to care.

At times it seems she has been unwilling to release her pandemic grip on the globe despite all of the global community’s remarkable speed of response honouring first signals of danger, exceptional speed and creativity in medical innovation, immense logistical strength of reach and roll-out of vaccines and essential supplies. Progress, unparalleled progress, was being made, but she was simply not impressed. It’s just goes on and on and on.

And so, people have become bored.

In parts of the world one where masks are coming off, one can feel a distinct feeling of having moved on – a dangerous acceptance that COVID 19 is simply going to be like any other flu. The fear has faded, the respect for risk has been lost. The widened lens of compassion for ‘we’ inspired by COVID is starting to pull back into a setting of ‘me’.

Yet in other parts of the world the case curve is suddenly going up. The level of audibility of conversations around a next wave of spread is going up. Threat of renewed border closures are going up.

The crisis continues, it goes on and on and on…

And then BOOM! Suddenly something else attracts attention. The world is thrown into another crisis – war in Ukraine – as one nation unleashes its muscle and might on another, stripping it a nation of its security, of its stability, of its humanity. The noise is louder, the images darker, the interest stronger.

COVID-19? The world looks away.

The world has become bored with COVID. People have forgotten the fact that it’s still with us. It might not be as loud, as dramatic (anymore), as incomprehensible. It might not be as visible, as shocking. It might not be attracting the attention it used to, but it is still going on and on and on.

We cannot afford to become bored – we cannot look away, putting ourselves in a position of not caring, be it about enduring COVID crisis, or the escalating Ukraine crisis, or the next, and the one after that, and the one after that. The emergence of new crises will go on and on and on and on.

We cannot become bored. Or we will forget.

And Mother Nature will never forgive us. x

Copyright: ANITA MENDIRATTA 2022