By Dr. Sally Torkos (Clinical and Research Psychology PhD with 30 year clinical practice)

This essay is going to be considering several different aspects of the Covid-19 Coronavirus impact, beginning with some considerations for you to think about. 

Think about what you have learned from your Covid-19 experience.  What has it been like for you?  Seriously think about it and its implications on your life, your future development or path, your goals, aims, and desires. Coronavirus may be a warning about what might become a trend in the future.  With or without the aid of human intervention, viruses, bacteria, and all manner of microscopic life are keeping pace with human ingenuity, and we only hope to be able to continue to create ways of dealing with them effectively.

How have you been using your time, especially if your occupation prior to Covid-19 has changed into something completely different? Have you caught the disease and been hospitalized, or know someone who has; perhaps you know someone who has died from it? Have you been relatively safe, just filling time, watching TV, playing on the computer, eating, sleeping, drinking, perhaps wasting it, waiting? Or have you done any soul searching, questioning, wondering what your own particular purpose is, what you are here to do? Has the global aspect of the outbreak affected you, with practically every country shut down, all borders closed, mass production way down, mass consumption way down, etc.? Are you confused, afraid, excited, amused, amazed or what? 

Have you felt constricted, controlled, had freedoms taken away, such as being able to:  gather in numbers; be with friends; shop in any store,  eat in any restaurant, go anywhere you want, whenever you want; have a job, earn enough money?  

What is it like to have your world turned completely upside-down? What is it like to consider how much you have taken your prior version of reality for granted, as if it could go on, forever and ever?  What is it like to face uncertainty, the vast unknown, and the immense possibilities both positive and negative?

One frightening possibility is that humans may become overwhelmed by deaths caused by some new, extremely contagious, virulent strain, (luckily, Covid-19 isn’t much more deadly than the common flu) and because there won’t be enough operators, our energy supplies won’t be maintained and with that loss comes the loss of internet, computers, anything powered by electricity, or gas, including water delivery systems and sewage plants, heat and cooling for our homes, and even pumping the gas for our cars. Would we be hurtled back into the Stone Age as some predict? It is something to think about. How prepared are you for what to do should the power fail in your country for any great length of time?

UNDERSTANDING HOW OUR BASIC ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS IS ESSENTIAL 

Here’s a brief account of how all power plants produce energy. First consideration, all energy production requires a transformation process.  For power plants, vast containers of water must be kept continuously boiling (no matter what the energy source is, coal, nuclear, alternative) to produce steam that drives great huge turbines running giant generators producing the electrical energy that then gets sent through high tension wires relayed to city or neighborhood transformer plants. Next, electricity comes through the wires from those plants, connecting to smaller transformers you can see on power poles (they look like round containers or boxes, often painted gray or white) connecting to where you are. The electrical power comes into your house constantly available for your use, at any time you can flip a switch, turn a knob, push a button or plug in and power surges through for you.  We are producing and consuming energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Every day giant vats are boiling water so you get to have power.  What a miracle of modernity this is.  Why do we waste so much of it? Why are we so unaware or unconscious? Because we really don’t understand what it takes to power up, that’s why. Every time we waste energy by leaving lights, computers, cell phones, etc. on unnecessarily, we are contributing to the pollution problem on our planet as well as wasting precious resources. 

Listen, I’m not trying to guilt trip anyone, I have a problem remembering to turn lights off when I leave a room.  Fortunately, I have a husband who is an energy scientist, who rather forcefully sometimes, reminds me to turn them off (for him it’s also ka-ching, ka-ching, money down the drain).  He has me turn off the lights, and doesn’t do it for me, because he wants me to LEARN! I asked him about how electricity is produced because I realized I was quite ignorant.  I did know it came from power plants and not the wall in my house where the outlets are, but that’s about it.  So, I am passing the information on to you.  If we all could just remember not to waste, (just imagine the world-wide waste from simply leaving lights on) we would be contributing to the longevity of our energy supplies, the health of the planet, and ourselves.

Just knowing about where and how the energy we use daily comes from isn’t enough.  We also need to further expand our consciousness to the energy wasting things we unconsciously do and make practical, conscious changes to out behavior.  It’s not easy, but it is doable. So, let’s do it together.  Whenever I remember to turn the light off, I’ll be keeping my commitment to you.                                 

Isn’t this an interesting thing to be coming out of our coronavirus considerations. Sometimes bad things happening can cause good results.  Like the Faustian Devil, Mephistopheles, who only wants to do evil and is frustrated because, continuously, only good results from his evil efforts.

CONSERVATIONISTS ARE HOPEFUL

There are some wonderful things that have happened as a result of Covid-19.  Terrence McCoy of the Washington Post writes: For centuries, humans have pushed wildlife into smaller and smaller corners of the planet. But now that billions of people all over the world are isolating in their homes and tourism is now almost non-existent, animals are roaming free. Wild boar have descended onto the streets of Barcelona. Mountain goats have overtaken a town in Wales. Baby turtles in Brazil are finally getting to the water without having to deal with all the human-caused obstacles. Whales are arriving in Mediterranean shipping lanes, dolphins frolicking in canals in Venice. Peacocks are strutting down the streets in Brazil and mountain lions are sleeping in trees in urban Colorado. Animals are sensing that people aren’t around much and are coming out more. In my area in Florida, I have seen more dolphins, manatee and other kinds of sea animals and fish than I have ever seen before in our nearby inland waterway. Have you seen more animals about?

Conservationists say the pandemic could be an opportunity to push for more environmental protections and create a safer world for animals as well as humans. Anthropologist Jane Goodall is hopeful: “By the time you get to 86, you realize that we can overcome these things. One day we will be better people, more responsible in our attitudes toward nature.”

More recent research is emerging that deepens understanding of how the risk of emerging diseases, many of which come from animals, is intensified by deforestation, hunting, and especially the global wildlife trade, particularly in exotic or endangered species. One of the ways the transmission of new diseases from animals to humans occur are wildlife markets, in which animals are kept in cramped, unclean, and unsanitary cages. These markets have been linked to both severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

(Though there is some speculation that coronavirus occurred because of bioengineering.)

Because of this recent outbreak, there is growing pressure on countries around the world to act. The U.N. biodiversity chief has called for a global ban on wildlife markets. So have 60 members of the U.S. Congress. More than 200 of the world’s leading conservation groups have asked the World Health Organization to take action against the wildlife trade.  A World Wildlife Fund survey of 5,000 people in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia found 90 percent supported government closures of unregulated wildlife markets. Feeling the pressure, China, whose voracious demand for animal parts creates much of the global wildlife trade, has taken the important first step of banning the consumption of wild animals and Vietnam intends to follow suit. “Humans are extraordinarily selfish,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Brookings Institution scholar who studies wildlife trafficking. “If they start dying, they will start taking actions to minimize their dying. The most impactful and consequential legislation always comes after the health risks.” It could also be that humans are incredibly unaware, not selfish, and when they start dying, it’s a big wake-up call to take action.

If the closures and crackdowns continue, the impact will be global, weakening the demand that supports unlawful wildlife trafficking, an illegal trade worth more than $23 billion annually. The ripple effects of enforcement in Asia could be felt as far away as Latin America, where jaguars and turtles are hunted and killed to meet demand in China.  Let’s just hope this enforcement continues, so that both wildlife and human lives can be saved.

Source:

• Apple News, 2020Apple, Inc. Cupertino, CA. containing multiple sources of online news: Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, etc. 4/2020.
• Aruna Viswanatha, “Pompeo (U.S. Secretary of State) Cites Evidence Virus is From Wuhan Lab,” The Wall Street Journal, 5/4/2020, A7.

WHAT ABOUT EDUCATION?

Have you been told to stay home from your school or university? If so, have you been told to do long distance learning and get your information and material for your classes online,  including getting tested? If also so, how has that affected your learning? Have the standards used to evaluate your learning and progress changed, become easier or more difficult? Reporters from The Wall Street Journal have noticed a growing problem within Teacher’s Unions, especially in California and Seattle. The Unions claim, in an effort to shield students from inequities at this time of crisis, especially those who don’t have access to computers and thus online classes, that they are considering letting all students pass with an ‘A,’ or just have a pass with no grade at all.  The Journal claims what they are actually doing is protecting their teachers sloppy work during the Pandemic, and that by letting students pass, its actually the teachers and the schools that are getting a pass.  They claim to be protecting the students regardless of the harm it does to the quality of education and learning the students are receiving. The Journal asked the rhetorical question: “If all students will be passing, why do any online homework at all?” Neglecting the hard work students put into getting a high grade, a representative of Seattle public schools claimed that: “grades have historically rewarded students with privilege and penalized others.” The Journal concludes with: “the pandemic will pass, but what used to be called the soft bigotry of low expectations helps no one but teachers who don’t want to be measured by what their students learn.”

In the ‘Letters to The Editor’ of a later edition of The Wall Street Journal, parents of high-school students and other educators criticized the easy grades, saying things like: “The joy that comes from hard work is free to all students . . . making grades meaningless communicates to students . . . that their dedication and effort now mean very little . . .;”  “Let’s take striving to be better out of the system. Let’s stop timing the Boston Marathon and declare all of the thousands of runners first-place winners. . . .”  

 “Why don’t we just cut to the chase: issue everyone a Ph.D. and a million dollar check at birth. . . .” One teacher upheld the need to give the free passes: “A child living in poverty . . . cannot be held to the same standards as a child from a well-educated family . . .”  I believe there has to be a way that all students can have an opportunity to learn, and those that don’t have access to the online technology, should have assignments mailed to them, or phone contact with their teachers, something that supports their learning too.  It is not true education if every student is forced to sacrifice proper education because there are inequities in income. What do you think? Would you like to have everyone get a pass whether they do the work or not?

I had to stop myself from continuing with more and more Coronavirus considerations, such as questioning the need for complete lockdowns, or ways to protect ourselves and get back to work because we don’t want the cure to be worse than the disease, or looking into more long-term implications, such as how to deal with China and how to gage the true cause of the virus. Or the many shipments of faulty masks and other equipment from China causing governments world-wide to begin questioning the viability of China’s products or our dependence on China for essential products such as medications and vitamins, when we now question their quality control. All this is perhaps material for another essay or for you to explore on your own.  I hope this has been a helpful, if not, eye-opening discussion and that you will continue thinking about your place in all of this. Bless you all and stay safe and healthy.

Source:

• Editors, “A Coronavirus ‘A’ for Everyone,” The Wall Street Journal, 4/27/20, Opinion Page.
• Leslie Geary, parent; Prof. William R. Jewell, M.D.; John Fortugno; and Jennifer Lacey, St. Paul Public Schools. “Letters to The Editor,” The Wall Street Journal, 5/4/2020, Opinion Page.

Cover photo credit: Antal Varga