Back in July, I was the happiest person in the world when Jagapathi actually replied to one of the comments I wrote during his InstaLive. The following is a video I had published about a month ago in which you can see the clip from the livestream during which my comment is read to Jagapathi by the comment monitor and Jagapathi replies to me.
Let’s start with a word-for-word transcript and an English translation of what was said:
Maybe “good” is a stretch. But I don’t think he meant “good” as in happy. I think he meant “good” as in a teaching moment, something negative that would bring about something positive even if it took some time and space, and— most importantly —perspective.
While I don’t believe in karma in that “whatever you do comes back to you” by way of magic or god of the devil, I do believe that we are capable of adjusting our actions (if not also our thinking) post-watching/experiencing negative events and emotions.
The human race nearly went extinct for the umpteeth time in 2020.
And we survived like we always do but not before losing so many people. I have family of family, friends of friends, and acquaintances of acquaintances who passed away. I have family, friends, and acquaintances who got sick. I, myself, had three scares. In fact, during the second scare, I experienced one of my spirals and wrote “When We Feel“.
And as much as it caused plenty of trauma, in many ways for the first time in a long time, we learned what it would be like to be the victims of endangerment. Post-covid, many changes in the world such as resource conservation, paper instead of plastic bags, and other measures that are good for the environment have become more commonplace.
While I don’t miss the days of mandatory masks and anti-vaxxers vs. vaxxers and social distancing, I also understand the good that came from it just as much as I understand the bad.
It’s not like human beings haven’t nearly gone extinct before and sure we’ve had the fair share of epidemics in the 21st Century, but how long ago was the last time that there was a global pandemic that terrorized everyone? Didn’t happen in my lifetime. Or even my parents. So even if we all thought the idea of conservation and environmental stewardship was cool, it was only cool enough for school projects and never in real life.
But it wasn’t only that covid hit us over the head as a wake up call in terms of our relationship to the environment but that it reminded us that we, humans, are all human. It doesn’t matter if we’re colored or non-colored, conservative or liberal, pro-life or pro-choice, religious or not, we’re not special. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much money we make or prestige we earn, we will die. So the least we can do is try to make the world livable for ourselves and everyone else while we’re around. My mother once told me that it doesn’t matter how nice you are, people will forget, but if you commit one wrong deed, everyone remembers. Her point was: don’t do wrong things. She was wrong. Because once you die, while people might remember the pain you caused, they won’t care enough to remember you. The only time we care enough to remember people outside of a history classroom or family reunion are when we care about them. And they’ll only remember us if they care about us. But it’s a little difficult to care without reciprocation.
Every generation has a wake up call.
For some, it was the British Empire. For some, it was world wars. For some it was technological revolution. For us, it is this. Covid. Came and went faster than most TV shows, but I think it’s one we’ll all remember and tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren about, and be interviewed by the new twenty-somethings twenty years later for history papers and throwback newspaper articles. We will remember how we all nearly died. We will remember how most of us survived. And we will remind them to never forget that we— humans, animals, trees, and everyone —are all a part of one world, united, oxygen and air shared, waters mingling in the oceans, the same sun and moon, and we owe it to ourselves and everyone to be good even if we don’t always do good.
Or maybe we’ll forget, maybe we’ll be in denial, maybe we’ll ignore it, maybe we’ll disagree, maybe we’ll be bored of all the research articles, news segments, TV shows and movies and books that are based on it. But we’ll always remember that we were given a chance. And we’ll remember if we chose not to take it.
