»That was the story of the coronavirus, my dear granddaughter, a story of psychosis from which we didn’t really come out as well or unscathed as we should have done.
We’re just a speck of dust in the Universe
Bernardo Congote
Colombia
When the Voyager 2 spacecraft was planning to leave the Solar System in the nineties, Carl Sagan asked for its camera to be pointed towards us to take our photograph. And this way, we found out that we are nothing but a pale blue speck in the Universe. Now, that little blue speck is under a death threat made by a virus that scientist call COVID-19. These scientists, vilified by believers, chiromancers, preachers and haruspices, are now chased by journalists, political and social networks. To kill them? No! To find out the truth. COVID-19 is saving us from the post-truth era. From the ephemeral kingdom of Twitter and Facebook.
Scientists are teaching us to wash our hands and look after our bodies, something that thousands of gods and priests hadn’t manage to achieve.
The one who calls himself God’s representative on Earth has locked himself in a palace. He doesn’t speak. And the square were his sheep usually hover around, is now empty. If he were to come to his window to give a speech, he wouldn’t have an audience, as he had deserved for centuries. The country which they say is God’s reign, Italy, is deserted. Europe, the empress of terror for centuries, is shaking, moaning and in lockdown. It’s a positive feeling to notice how pleasantly peaceful it is now, in the middle of Trump’s silence, and also now that the Chinese dragon hardly spits the flame of a match. The overly mass-produced goods are detained at the harbours because consumers are buying less. The oceans, infested with tankers, are desolate. The airports, empty.
What are we learning from this? Our own insignificance. Our belonging to a little planet which we had destroyed with no compassion and with the hope of reaching quickly a fantasy heaven. The apocalypse has arrived already; we’ve been building it for centuries. The churches are heading towards becoming museums, we could even substitute them for schools. Teachers could now achieve the position required by humanity eager for knowledge. Schools should function twenty-four hours a day, and at the same time brothels should close down.
Our arrogance has made us think that Earth is immense because there are cars that reach 400 km/h and planes that get to 1,200 km/h. However, our planet travels the Solar System at around 40.000 km/h and the light’s wave-particles travel at 300.000 km/s. The universe we can actually manage to see is just 5% of the total, the other 95% is made out of dark matter and energy. It’s believed that the history of mankind only spans across 200,000 years, while the known Universe’s is estimated around 13m500 millions of years.
We have deified our ignorance! The search for a sole path should be understood as multi-trajectory; what we considered to be true, as untrue. It’s advisable to change the predictive ability of priests for the scientific empire of the doubt; our eagerness to live in balance, for the permanent unbalance; the search for equality, for the awareness of the unequal reality. It’s in our own interest to learn again what we thought we already knew.
To those people who thought the world was going to end, I give you the good news that it’s hardly starting thanks to a virus. It has made us aware of our small size in front of the immense universe and it has left wide-open the doors to the world of wonderland.
All this because of Carmela
Jhonny Castillo
Montevideo, Uruguay
These days I haven’t stopped thinking about a course on historical demography about the black plague which I attended a few years ago. There we took some time to analyse the prologue of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. The Italian author, who belongs to the humanistic school of thought, besides writing about the scourge that was decreasing the population in the 14th century, he talked about the cruelty of abandoning the sick to avoid infection: on the third day of showing signs of the plague —among them, stained spots on the skin—, the convalescent patient would die. These stains are the equivalent to cough and fever nowadays. The isolation and the social distancing are now being battled with the use of technology, but the vulnerability of the species is still the same.
And, talking about vulnerability, Uruguay became news to the world for not having any patients with the virus. They all blame Carmela for the disease reaching the country now. This small country ended up honouring that popular saying which reads «small country, big hell». The theme of conversations now is not the weather or crime, but the virus, and three key words: Milan, marriage and Carrasco.
It turns out that a fashion designer was in Milan and she says that when she returned to the country she requested to be tested for coronavirus at the airport. She didn’t get an effective reply from the public officials so she continued with her life as normal, in the bubble of her world of furs. A few days later, she decided to attend a wedding with over five hundred guests, and after that she found out she had coronavirus.
Carmela told her story to the newspaper El País, putting the blame on the government forces for their health inefficiency for not having done the appropriate tests. However, she has been heavily criticised, especially for her lack of common sense and caution. There was a leak of a few recordings where some of Carmela’s acquaintances accuse her of being stupid and showing a cold and absurd individualism where the “I” prevails over the “we”.
I’ve turned a bit sceptical since I arrived in Uruguay two years ago. But it’s kind of odd that the virus appeared on Friday 13. Everybody talked about Carmela more than the disease. They said: «It’s all Carmela’s fault, it’s because of her that this is happening to us». As Carmela is posh and lives in Carrasco, one of the wealthy neighbourhoods of Santiago, there have been recommendations not to go to that particular neighbourhood, but also not to go to poor areas where for sure nobody there had been to Milan….
What started as just factory gossip has turned real and there are now fifty cases of infection. I was sent home, teleworking, for being asthmatic. You see know the fast pace of people in the street. I live with three friends and in our home there’s an unprecedented revolution taking place: we all clean with enthusiasm. There’s a smell of chlorine, soap and isopropyl alcohol.
I told my colleagues of the quarantines we had in Venezuela: «You could go out, yes. But, in times of social conflict, your life was in danger. If you demanded your rights, you were in risk of ending in jail or injured. That’s why we had to be prepared to stay at home. You would buy and eat whatever was available». In war times in my country, between 2014 and 2017, you knew that it would all end when either the people got tired or when the government yielded. It was always a case of the former. This situation is different because it comes with pure and hard uncertainty. For now, we will remain isolated, without personal contact, like in the times of the black plague. What started as the union of two people in marriage, today is separating us. Thank you, Carmela.
A voice for the world
Adonay Vilche
Maracay, Venezuela
In our global society, mankind has forgotten its origin for a future it won’t see, creating a reality where what’s valued is not the simple but the complex. Mankind and its dynamics are the origin of the pain we are experiencing right now. We are the ones who caused this distressing situation of social and
