Great! There is a vaccine for Covid-19! It’s time to move on—to the grip of the next pain…
While it does indeed look like we’re almost through with Covid-19, it’s clear that we haven’t done anything to merit getting over it. And what we haven’t done in 2020, we’ll drag along to 2021. With the additional challenges that the next stage in our development is destined to present us, there is no doubt that next year will be harder than this year.
What haven’t we done? We haven’t learned that we are interdependent; we haven’t grasped it deeply and internalized its message: that we have to take care of each other just as much, if not more than we take care of ourselves, or else we make each other sick. We also didn’t learn that the job market has changed forever, and we haven’t prepared a new one, suitable for the new era. We haven’t grasped that the most important work today is to build solidarity and mutual responsibility. All we have done is blame one another for every wrong we could detect, while regarding ourselves as blameless. In the past year, we failed to realize that blaming someone for holding other views is not only flawed; it is self-injurious since if you destroy that other, you will destroy yourself as well. We haven’t realized that we cannot be right if we think someone else is wrong for having other views. We wouldn’t be thinking what we’re thinking unless those other people thought what they are thinking. This is the truth, and we haven’t gotten any closer this year to recognizing it.
The job market we should have built, to return to our past year’s failures, should have been one where people worked at what was necessary, while the rest of the people were occupied with cultivating solidarity, since, as just said, the most important work we can do today is connect with one another. As for income, anyone who engaged in these pro-social occupations would receive an income that would suffice for decent living. It would replace existing benefit programs, and receiving this income would be contingent upon participating in these efforts to build solidarity in the community, the country, and the world.
While it sounds like a tall order, and not something we can achieve in a single year, we haven’t even taken step one, and this is where we failed.
Now that there is a vaccine, people will want to return to the 2019 way of life. It might boom for a while, but it will soon dwindle. We have changed during the past year; we need a new kind of satisfaction, deeper and more meaningful, one that relates to relationships and not to material goods and showoff. Employers will look for employees but they will be much harder to find, and like it or not, we will have to go in the direction that Covid-19 has pointed us: connection in the hearts rather than in the bodies.
And as before, the longer we stall in 2021, the more painful the next blow, which will come for sure, will be.