Postmortem 10

Life has never been easy.  This I know very well.  I know this even better than a lot of people, because I have not had an easy life.  Interesting, yes.  Rich, though not monetarily, yes.  Beautiful.  Often, and in many ways beautiful.  Painful, yes, and I have already written enough about that.  There is really nothing unprecedented about what is going on right now.  We have had pandemics before, but minus the sense of entitlement.

Hey you guys, it's only a pandemic!  We will get through this.  We always have and we always will.  The problem is that so many of has have gone so soft and spoiled after a couple of generations of self-indulgence and self-entitlement that it was going to be either a war or a pandemic that would whip us into shape.   Just for the record, I am not particularly in favour of either, wars or pandemics, and really the less of them the better.  But if that's what it's going to take to teach us humility and make us a little bit kinder to one another then I'm not exactly going to baulk.  No, I don't like it that vulnerable elderly people are the most likely to contract and die from the virus.  Neither am I going to suggest here that those deaths could be a necessary evil, kind of like collateral damage.  Wars and plagues are horrible, and the less of them the better.  But should they strike, maybe we could at least see what kind of good we might derive out of the horror and chaos.

I mentioned to a friend the other day, who is a mother and grandmother, that being a woman, she will know far better than me, that generally there is no such thing as pain-free childbirth.  And, yes, I am all in favour of epidurals,  I don't like pain, and to me it is absolutely a great idea to make our lives as painless as possible. But there is no guarantee that it's going to stay that way.  It never does.  Anyone looking back on their lives, especially when we're a certain age, will acknowledge and celebrate how the most painful and difficult periods in our lives have also been the most rewarding, the most thrilling, the most enjoyable. 

We will get through this pandemic, and I hope they come up with a vaccine much sooner than later.  But let's also be open to the many lessons that we are going to be learning from this, and the many changes we are going to have to accept, if only to help make us better people.