Nearly two trillion dollars is spent by nations each year on increasingly deadly and sophisticated weapons of war. What if an invisible virus arrives against which even the atomic bomb is useless? Why else would those arsenals build a happier and fairer world?
The drama that the bewildered, frightened and powerless society is experiencing in the face of this virus is a good lesson in humility for the most powerful nations. Let's think only of the United States with a warrior president like Donald Trump unable to stop the virus. The honesty of a people and its security do not go through the weapons of war. And arrogant characters like Trump, who are examples of discord and who go to war with even the WHO at such a painful time for humanity, go against the feeling of the world community.
In America that feels powerful and invulnerable for having the most sophisticated weapons on earth, a simple virus has just left 22 million people without work and food.
If only a part of that barbarity spent every year in manufacturing new weapons had been used to improve health and medical-scientific research, or to engender better social justice, today the greatest arms powers would not feel so powerless and distraught with the new virus
From Pope Francis sadly praying alone in the empty St. Peter's Basilica, to philosophers and sociologists of all political and religious creeds are mobilizing so that this tragedy that is punishing pride and human greed serves as a warning to a civilization that felt until yesterday so strong and secure with its weapons of war. If it were not tragic, because it creates pain and death, it would be even comical for a virus to be able to take revenge on the supposed omnipotence of Homo sapiens.
The question that thinkers around the world ask themselves today is whether this lesson in humility to which the coranovirus is subjecting us will at least serve to make us rethink our way of life hitherto crazed by consumerism and the god of profit. any cost. It will serve to rethink our current unjust and classist power structures that condemn millions of people to poverty and even hunger and insecurity.
Or if the other way around we will leave this hell more proud still leaving in oblivion the cry of the voiceless because the new powerful have been kidnapped. Those powerful that could go out with more desire to dominate the planet by re-betting more on the strength of arms and money than on the regeneration of a new universal hope.
It is never too late, however. And this unprecedented test for our generation, global and imponderable, could also do the miracle of awakening a new social awareness of our fragility and omnipotence. It could serve to recreate together a new civilization less based on the power and greed of a handful of people who bully the majority. Or to realize that we are all, without class distinctions, vulnerable. That we need to arm ourselves with greater understanding with the pain of others. That the best and most effective weapons are those of the hands and hearts open to solidarity, compassion and the search for peace for all.
Better a world more afraid of the invisible and imponderable weapons of nature, which we are mistreating and humiliating, than the pride of feeling ourselves owners of the warehouses of weapons made with the blood of those who always pay the bill for pain.
May this tragedy be transformed into the humility of knowing that we are all so insignificant that a simple virus dismantles the world.
Nothing could be worse for our civilization than not knowing how to understand the lesson that nature so mortified and preyed upon us is imposing on us. It would be a mockery if those who until now have dominated the world with murderous capitalism woke up from the fright of the pandemic as if nothing had happened.
What humanity is experiencing right now is not a "bad dream in a bad inn", in the words of Cervantes in Don Quixote, but rather a knock to wake us up from our immoral dream that the poor will continue to accept to continue being easy meat of resignation. The pain and rage of those always humiliated and despised by those who feel like masters of everything because they are the owners of the weapons of death, could become a new virus that collapses their dreams of omnipotence.
Or is it that the powerful think that the poor will not end up getting tired one day of peacefully settling for the crumbs that fall from their tables?
The tragedy of the coronavirus could serve, as a last lesson, so that those who have decided that they are the masters of the lives of others understand that wanting to perpetuate that distance between satiated and hungry could end up burying them too.
We're still on time. That this forced retirement of all serves us to reflect that or we accept in the future to live with greater simplicity, without rampant consumerism, disinterested that there are people left to their fate, or we could all end up victims of the imponderables of nature, who have a codex of behavior that is not ours.
If we do not understand the symbolic gravity of this pandemic, we will all have come out of it physically, socially and even spiritually dead.
The virus has made us see that we are at the end of an era, of revision of the concept of society. Something like the end of slavery was. This test forces us to rethink concepts that we believed to be immutable and untouchable such as class division, the sense of globality and borders, the unjust financial system. And even of currency and money. It will even force us to a review of culture and religion.
If nothing changed after this convulsion, we will have lost the opportunity to begin to try together a different way of seeing and organizing a world in which there is a decent place for everyone. But there is a star that shines in the obfuscated sky of this moment. The number of people who are moved by the pain of others grows and offers examples of unprecedented generosity in our selfish society.
Two small stories have moved and hurt me at the same time: the first in Italy, where a priest in the hospital took off his respirator to offer it to someone younger. The second, the Brazilian mother becomes ill along with the 24-year-old son. She let the crowded son go before the hospital, who ended up dying, and the mother who was saved in the end did not have the consolation of being able to say goodbye to her son. They are real events and feelings of empathy that are awakening the best that we have within us and that the whirlwind of life had hidden.
It is the luminous and regenerating face of the human being that the tragedy is rescuing and tells us that the hope for a more humane and compassionate world is not yet dead. Or is it just utopia? Perhaps, but it is true that without a bit of hope and in the hands only of the prophets of pessimism, the abyss of pain that awaits us will be much greater.
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