What if this CoVid19 virus was a wakeup call

Spring Equinox
March 19, 2020

What if this CoVid19 virus was a wake up call but not just to be better prepared for the next pandemic? What if this is really nature’s attempt to save the environment by showing us another way and giving us the chance to reflect and make a 180 degree shift? Back in the 70s we had a motto that was never as relevant as it is now. “Do less with less.” 

While everyone is wondering when we can get back to normal and back to ‘business as usual’. What if that is the totally wrong wish for the future? Business as usual has put us at risk and caused climate change to escalate.

Instead of spending billions bailing out the airlines and all the other corporations that have never put any of their profits away for a rainy day, and then tossing a band aid to people to placate them, what if we instead took a different approach and invested billions to put all the people who are able back to work. We did it in the 30s and we could do it again, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, roads and bridges, thinning forests to protect from wildfires, reclaiming idle land to grow our food, building solar and wind farms and bolstering all the new technologies that are part of the solution. Many of these jobs could be done now, and even while social distancing.

For all of us sequestered at home with time on our hands, what if we used this time to envision a new future, to write and email and call our leaders - US, State, County, and local officials, newspapers, blogs, and tweets? Many of us have been too busy surviving to be active politically.

Now that our survival is being put on the line, perhaps it is the perfect time to be the flood (of letters) and the winds (and words) of change that can secure our survival beyond this pandemic and all that may follow. Even when we survive this wake up call, if we get back to business as usual, we will still be headed off the cliff of climate change. Let’s embrace this time to change the story we are writing and perhaps then we won’t need other pandemics to wake us up again and again.

Jean Nichols
Llano NM 87543