Covid-19 Update #1: 17 March, 2020
On December 24th, 1968 as Apollo-8 came up from behind the far side of the moon on their 4th orbit the crew of experienced something never seen before by human eyes. The crew saw the entire Earth hanging in the blackness of space rising up from behind the lunar horizon. During that orbit, Bill Anders took a famous photo known as Earthrise which forever changed the way we see our world and ourselves.
Earthrise showed us who we really are, one single human family with a common origin and a shared future. For a brief moment in 1968, the world was one. For a brief moment, the world rallied around the image of Earthrise and its obvious truth. But the significance and meaning of that photo have all but been forgotten. We have fallen asleep and have forgotten our true unity.
Challenges like the one we are presently facing with the Coronavirus can serve as a wakeup call. A wakeup call that doubles as a call to action. A wake-up call to recognize and embrace the true unity that we as a species are called to. The only way we will overcome the threat that we presently all face and to limit the virus’s aftermath is to set aside our differences and work together.
Diseases do not recognize our artificial manmade borders and neither can our response. Illness does not recognize any of the artificial things we’ve erected to separate ourselves from one another. It does not recognize race, religion, nationality, social status, educational background, or the amount of money we have in our bank accounts. It doesn’t recognize our political party or the news channel we choose to watch and neither can our response.
Coronavirus is not a global pandemic because we don’t live on a globe. Coronavirus is a planetary pandemic that won’t be overcome unless we shift our thinking from global to planetary. Global treats people as nodes of a computer network, numbers on actuary tables, and as a workforce and consumer base. Global treats everything including the very life support systems of our planet as the wholly-owned subsidiary of the global economy. Planetary treats every person as a valued member of one single human family embedded in our planet’s biosphere. A biosphere we share with every other interdependent life form on our planet.
It is times like these where we really need to start acting like a single human family. We need to watch out for and take care of each other. Each of us needs to rise above a complete focus on our individual concerns and elevate our concern toward all. We all need to be willing to endure a little inconvenience and sacrifice in order to protect our most vulnerable neighbors. We all need to educate ourselves on the actual effective ways to combat the spread of the virus.
We truly are all in this together. We truly are one human family. If we can start acting that way and face this planetary threat together we will be able to realize how incredibly powerful a unified human species can be. Our renewed unity can be the silver lining of these challenging and heartbreaking times. Then, the realization of our shared strength can serve as a rallying cry to overcome other critical challenges facing our world.
We don’t have to be in orbit to have an orbital perspective and by coming together as a single human family we can overcome anything. Let’s all be a part of our planet’s immune response.
