So I was at Costco doing some ritualistic apocalypse shopping and the meat racks were empty. Wait a minute, didn’t we get Covid 19 from consuming meat? I hear that liquor stores and gun shops are also emptied by the same curious species of animals called humans. So who is creating this end of the world again? I continue to wonder as I stroll past lustrous spaces created by the lack of toilet papers.

These days I feel like we are all collectively playing a game of escape room, the room is earth. It is getting smaller and more suffocating. Many players are having trouble breathing. We have to figure out the clues before our time run out. Time has ran out for some players. To date, more than seven thousand of them have left the game.

My script writing coach tells me there are only three kinds of battles: Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self. On the surface Covid 19 looks like a Man vs. Nature battle, but is it really?

Truth is, viruses have been around for tens of millions of years. We have not. Viruses was here when we got here and will continue to be here when we vanish. We either figure out how to live with them or die. There is no sugar-coating this bitter pill.

Some may say, what if the Chinese didn’t eat bats? To date there is no proof that any people in Wuhan ate bats to get sick. It only takes one infected bat pooping in a fish pond to contaminate the food source. And what about bushmeat in Africa? Should we build a McDonald on every corner of the globe so people don’t have to hunt for food? What about industrial chicken, hog, cattle, sheep farms? How quickly can a virus or bacteria infiltrate them and wreak havoc on our global network? Don’t even get me started on spinach, lettuce and bean sprouts. (I am serious, starting bean sprouts indoors is a wet smelly mess at best. Are you reading this Toby?)

Before the dawn of industrialization a virus makes a jump from a wild animal to an individual, kills his family and half of his village. Then the virus dies with their buried hosts. End of story until the next episode. In the year 2020, the village of any one individual IS the globe. So we are seeing half our village die.  Seven billion divided by two is a huge freaking number! And that is terrifying and heart-breaking, but it is nothing new. Viruses will do what viruses do – infecting, adapting, consuming, evolving, transmitting,  rinse and repeat.

Men hunting from a ridge above the Yaeda valley. Near the Hadza camp of Dedauko.

So what the heck can we do? I do not have the answers. But I do have an inkling. We can never win the war against the virus, but we can learn not to become a virus ourselves. What we are doing to our planet IS what Covid 19 is doing to us. Are we not infecting our host planet with poison? Are we not extracting from it all we can in the name of growth and profit? Are we not mindlessly consuming and multiplying just so we can consume more and more and more?

Go ahead, take a look at the millions of acres of industrial wasteland, clear cut forests, garbage dumps, slumps, bleached coral reefs, contaminated beaches, long list of wildlife extinction, abandoned mines, sink holes, nuclear dump sites, agricultural disaster zones, chemical dump areas, polluted lakes, rivers and streams. Go ahead and tell me I am wrong, Put the satellite picture of a rainforest and a Covid 19 infected lung side by side and tell me you don’t see similarities.  Tell me that we are not the virus of our planet.

Lungs of our planet vs. Lungs of our body.

What do you see in the post Covid 19 world? Business as usual? We all go back to our insignificant little lives and try to forget the nightmare as best we can? We continue to pretend what we do does not matter? We keep telling ourselves our voices are not important? We stay small, stay meek, stay quiet about things that matter? We keep on truckin’ and let “the machine”, “the system”, “the big brother”, “the monster”, “the whatever” sweep us off our feet and force feed us garbage of the mind and soul?

Of Course we will. Because when the endgame comes and the alarm bell sounds and a big hand comes down to say: “You had your chance but you failed.” We can all conveniently point to others and say: “It is not my fault.” It is not my fault that I fucked up my one and only chance to shine, my one and only chance to make a better world for myself and my children, my one and only chance to show the universe my true colours and make a difference. I am not to blame! Someone else did it for me!

Keep doing the same things and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. To answer the question “What the heck do we do now?” What if we tried something different together?  Let us take a deep breath; slow down; clear our minds; open our hearts;  focus on what we truly want; concentrate on the immensity of love; meditate on the infinity of time… Let us give the universal intelligence a chance to enter and work through us.

3-2-1, Now open your eyes. What are you staring at me for? You had the answer all along Dorathy. Go ahead and be that person. It is that simple.

Leave a comment below and let us know what you want for our world.

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Thank you for letting me share some ideas with you.

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Published by ZEN WANG

Nuclear Project Engineer turned Filmmaker. View all posts by ZEN WANG