After months of waiting, the highspeed vaccination train is finally leaving the station, and hopefully, soon, they’ll be room for everyone on board. It is perhaps the first time in history that every human being on our planet has faced the same phenomenon simultaneously. The worldwide scale of this pandemic has redesigned borders and is testing our society at its foundation. It has shown the efficiency of the scientific community, who, given simple guidelines, in less than a year came up with multiple vaccines from different continents. At the opposite end, we are watching the collapse of the political sphere, where there has been almost no international coordination, insufficient support for the medical community, and a disastrous level of miscommunication regarding the virus and the vaccination implementation. Even worse are the corporations, which are basically sitting out the pandemic, waiting to steal anything they can while at the same time concentrating their power even more, like vultures feasting on weakened prey.
Here we are in front of this peculiar situation, with a vaccination process that, day by day, gains momentum and a mainstream media campaign that promises we are soon going “back to normal.” (In his first major speech, President Biden bragged “The U.S. could return to a kind of normal by the Fourth of July.”) This is crazy: no one wants to go back to normal, when “normal” meant violence against women, families living in poverty, meaningless jobs, polluted air and water, segregated schools, racist religions, immoral military budgets, and corrupt politicians. This “normal” is blocking humanity’s evolutionary process of surpassing pain and suffering, and is undermining the construction of a diverse and nonviolent universal human nation. Here are few synonyms for normal: usual, standard, typical, common, ordinary, conventional, habitual, expected, boring, mechanical. I ask you, who wants to live in a normal society?
People of the world didn’t endure this pandemic and undergo all of these troubles for nothing. Everyone is aware that things have to change everywhere. It is the moment to humanize the earth, an opportunity to grasp a new perspective on life and to forge a new image of our collective future. The relationship between cultures needs to be humanized, corporations and economic systems need to be humanized, social participation and political representation need to be humanized, our relationship with nature and our planet needs to be humanized. The meaning of our lives needs to be humanized.
As we have seen with the pandemic, and before that with climate change, the world is one and interconnected. Now, people need to feel one and interconnected. Our force is our universality; everything has to be for everyone. We can’t vaccinate some and not all. We can’t have some working for climate change and others polluting like madmen. We can’t have some nations with food bombing others with starving communities. We can’t have a few countries with nuclear weapons and others bullied like kids on a playground. We can’t have some families with multiple homes and others living on the street. We can’t have some children with laptops and wifi connection and others without even lunch. We are done trying to find a piecemeal solution, giving a little to some and not to others. We can no longer let the System play its “power of division” politics. “Divide ut regnes” (divide, in order to reign) was a Roman practice of relocating groups with longstanding grudges in close proximity to one another so that their constant fighting would keep them from collaborating to overthrow Roman rule. It is still the prevalent governing tactic today, and we must be vigilant to prevent it from being used against us.
We are the front-line workers of humanity’s future, fighting against apathy and nihilism, striving for converging diversity, organizing against injustice through active-nonviolence, and promoting equal rights and equal opportunities for all human beings. We will need everyone’s energy, ideas, and effort if we are going to take advantage of this opportunity and, hopefully, finally, never go back to normal.
