The last few months have been… terrible, to say at least. So many unthinkable things have happened since the “Great Lockdown” (as the IMF authorities are calling it) began that it is starting to look like a movie with a not very good writing team. This is probably the “one in a life-time” crisis we are told in our classes that happens once every generation, one that is not only of economic and social magnitude, but one that changes the unwritten institutions on which society relies to function, the thing is it seems to be that, like with every other great crisis the world has ever passed through, the pandemic was just the catalyzer that people were looking to start the change.
When we start to think that, one always looks back, either to find relief because this is not the worst thing that has ever happened, or to look at the solutions people used to recover from the crisis they lived in that era. But, when you do that, you can only see one event that affected and changed the world in the same way as the one we are currently living, and it is the seminal catastrophe, the one that ignited Europe in flames 100 years ago, and in that situation, the main problem were currently living was treated then as an annoying flu making the soldiers die. But, there is something very interesting we can learn about it, and it is how the results of the war did change something, or to put it mildly, how the then leaders of the world tried to make that disaster an opportunity, one that would have made the world a better place. Although we know they failed, and that they made terrible choices, whose some of those consequences we are still suffering, they tried it again fifteen years later, in the aftermath of World War II, and this time they succeed, they created a new world, a new world with the promise of peace and a better quality of life.
We could of course argue that they failed once again. Personally, I would not say they failed, because the world they created is a fairer one, a peaceful one, but is not exactly the world they promise to the people (being, in the other hand, exactly the world they really wanted to) and this flows, created tensions, unrest, because what had seemed to changed so much after the war, was not the same for everyone, it was an unequally distributed world, in all the dimensions possible: it is terrible when you how it distribute the income, and it is sinister guaranteeing the same human rights to everyone. But nevertheless, it was better than the one we used to have.
In this concept of “recreating” the world, I want to evoke the words of a famous Parisian seamstress “My life didn't please me, so I created a new one”. Isn't this what we should start to do in this crisis? Although people around the world are doing demonstrations to show their discontent with the actual social status quo, it is hard to assure that this demonstration is going to make a statement in time and history. Everyone seems to be tired of a society that excludes and kills minorities, doesn't give enough opportunities to the poor and is sexist, but the thing is that there are no clues that this change is for real, all countries around the world have experienced big riots, USA suffer some with the same force as now in the 1960s, what brigs once again the question, What can be done to achieve the change we ache for?
As a good institution, the system is no more than the summary of those who compose it, we are the system. To change the system, we must change ourselves first, change the way we think, how we consume, how we feel and understand our relationship with the environment, with our governments, with our bodies, with everything. We have the chance, for once, to create a life that is not built only in the benefit-loss duality, we must create a life that rests in the concept of humanity, in the concept of dignity. And this is our one shot.
