Indifference

You'd think that the world has seen the worst that mankind can ever face. Towards the end of 2019, we thought World War III was already upon us. We were scared shit that the US and Iran would really engage in an all-out war. For a time back in 2017, North Korea drew the ire of the international community with its nuclear tests. We got really worked up on the threat of their missiles, only to see ourselves, 3 years later, falling on the heels of a tiny parasite that we cannot even see under the aid of a regular light microscope but through an electron microscope: the Covid-19 or more popularly known as the Corona Virus.

History tells us that we've been through some of the world's major pandemics. The Black Death from the 1300s, the Small Pox in the 1500s; the Bubonic Plague in 1665. And hey, who can forget the pandemic that inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "Love in the Time of Cholera" in the late 1800s? 

More recently, in the early 1900s about 40-50M were killed by the Spanish Flu. (And we thought the Ebola Virus scare in the first half of this decade was already scary enough).

So I've been thinking, out of all the known pandemics in human history, the worst of it has not been named. It cannot be seen under a light microscope or even under the $27 Million at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. We cannot see it because it resides in the human psyche, but it's far more deadly than any virus or bacteria that we can ever discover. It's indifference.

Indifference is what blinds us to overlook the plight of our fellow Filipinos who do not share the same fortune or "blessings" that we have. It's what allows us to unconsciously rub the convenience and luxury that we enjoy and announce it to the world because we feel that we are just being thankful. It's the same disease that infects the best of us when we assume that our opinion is better than others simply because we just do not agree with them, or it's against our [religious] beliefs. Worse, it's what gives the privileged few in authority to believe that their lives matter more than others and they can get tested for coronavirus while the common people are left unchecked and instantly sent to their death beds.

In contrast, it's what also drives us to lie about our travel history and condition to a physician because we feel that it's their job to care for us anyway and what prompts some people to be careless and insist on going out despite having enough provision. We do not care enough even when we appear to care so much. The truth is, some or should I say most of us just don't care about anything but ourselves.

It's what would probably kill most of us in the end. Or maybe I'm just being melodramatic.
Am I?

But unlike Covid-19, indifference is not uncurable. One does not have to be tested positive to start getting treatment and heal. Surely, we all need to heal. But when do we start healing?

We all heal when we begin to look at ourselves and realize that the sentient beings on top of Kingdom Animalia with the capacity to feel and rationalize things aren't doing enough to make the world a better place because we're all too busy making it better for ourselves and ourselves alone.

We start to heal when we look beyond messages and words. We begin to recuperate when we realize that it's not always about us and that in the grand scheme of things, we are far more connected than we think we are. Lines may have been drawn to keep us distant but we will soon find ourselves warm because we refused to leave out others in the cold.

Reference: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/