A great many of us would have, these past few days, been part of the near universal ‘Happy New Year’ ritual knowing only too well that, at best, we would have been, this time around, hedging our bets, going through the motions, acutely aware of the fact that our hopes and our wishes are decidedly at variance with what appears to lie before us. To say that we are not starting the year on the surest of footings is to indulge in considerable understatement. Over time, we have become accustomed to periodic breaks in our stride pattern, interludes that cause us to have to pause and reset. On those occasions it sometimes takes a while for normalcy to be restored but eventually we have always managed to return to a position of relative comfort. The difference, this time around, reposes in the complete absence of anything even remotely resembling predictability. It appears that 2021 has found us confronted with the reality that the virus has now wound itself up for another charge, that what might have, a year or so ago, been perceived to be, at best, a significant break in our accustomed pattern of challenges that we, sooner or later surmount, what confronts us now is a decidedly transformative phenomenon.
That what we are now being told is the mutative manifestations of the COVID-19 would have done much to erode the modicum of uplifted spirits that had coincided with the global disclosure of the arrival of a vaccination. That mutation disclosure would have cast something of a pall of gloom over the news of a possible remedy. If indeed there is some kind of chameleon characteristic to the virus then that will almost certainly have the scientists scurrying back into their laboratories while the rest of us pursue the only course that we really can, returning to battening down the hatches and keeping our fingers crossed.
And after a year of debilitating impact on every facet of our lives and what is now an inability to set time frames for a return to ‘normalcy’ – if such a word can be properly applied to this circumstance – might we not now be approaching a point where we will be challenged to dig much deeper in search of societal adjustments that go beyond the sanitation and social distancing protocols that have now become a way of life and might these new measures not have an even more deleterious effect on our survival-related ‘vitals’ like our economies and our education systems?
Our education system, one might add, is, even now, hanging on by a proverbial thread, the strictures of the pandemic combining with the prior condition of underdevelopment into which our teaching-learning infrastructure had long sunk to create a possible devastating, long-term disfiguration.
It had, of course, long been felt that the incompatibility between the customarily spirited nature of the yuletide festivities and the strictures which, hopefully, would check the rampage of the pandemic, would require a tempering of the former. Truth be told there appeared to have been no resolute official doubling down on the curfew-related restrictions. Indeed, official pushback against the anticipated seasonal excesses appeared weak and indecisive, allowing much delinquency to prevail. At some point in time, one feels, there may well be a price to pay, a juncture of reckoning here. One might add, though its amounts to cold comfort, that the yuletide excesses that were in evidence here appeared to have been replicated in other CARICOM territories. In Barbados, for example, the authorities have reportedly been forced to go into overdrive to respond to what, reportedly, have been the significant number of COVID-19 cases resulting from what we were told was a “Boxing Day Bus Crawl,” which, by the sound of it, appeared to have been a kind of Caribbean-style bacchanal aboard a bus. Trinidad and Tobago, according to reports, appeared to have challenges of a similar nature.
Our own version of this particular (apparently seasonal) entertainment offering would have been those familiar Old Year’s Night ‘Brams’ that drift into the not-so-wee hours of New Year’s Day and which were very much in evidence this time around. Will there be a price to pay here as well?
All of this means that those who care have been left nervously clutching at a hope that the outcomes of our delinquency are, at worst, manageable; that the outcomes of our yuletide excesses do not leave us precariously attached to a wing and a prayer.
Loathe as we might be to concede it, 2021 may have added a new dimension to our confrontation with the COVID-19 pandemic. What might have changed, even if, perhaps, not altogether so, is that nothing-lasts-forever mindset that might have, up until now, caused us to settle for the reality of having to wait-out the pandemic, of coming to terms with an understanding that it would have to run its course, so to speak. After all, has it not been common, historically, for us to have to pit our stamina and our patience against other challenges?
In the instance of the Coronavirus it is beginning to seem that the malady might be possessed of some kind of ‘Plan B’ that turns the encounter into a more protracted chess game rather than simply one of those less complicated encounters in which you simply ‘dig in’ and wait for the other side to spend itself.
There is, too, the matter of just how we are likely to react to the fact that a point still appears to have not yet been reached where, in order to continue to pursue our agenda as a human society we can assume an as-you-were position where the strictures would have been stripped from our normal lives and the shutters re-opened to let a semblance of normalcy in. Not only has that not happened, but even as we had allowed ourselves a measure of reassurance arising out of the advent of a vaccination, the virus is beginning to ‘turn’ new tricks of its own.
It appears – and there can be no greater global challenge for the human community in the year ahead – that where our grim and now likely protracted encounter with COVID-19 is concerned, we are going to have to (as we say in Guyana) ‘go and come again.’