This morning, after posting F is for Fighting, I read a piece online in the Financial Times by the wonderful writer Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) written five days ago. It tells of the tragic events unfolding in India under the [monstrous] Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister – Narendra Modi. The usual catalogue of bad decisions based on early denial, but in a country of teeming millions of poor crammed into slums, this will be a human disaster of epic proportions.
In her preamble, Arundhati says, and I can’t quote for copywriter reasons and so must paraphrase, but please go and read the full work – that governments who are in charge of the response to the virus pandemic are fond of referring to it as a war and that they mean it literally rather than metaphorically. But if it was really a war, then the US, which has been woefully unprepared for the virus, would be the best prepared with guns and planes, soldiers and bombs.
Arundhati Roy spells out in much more detail than I and with far greater eloquence, the dangers of poor leadership and the human costs that are being engendered. At the end, she describes pandemics throughout history, as portals to a different future where-through we will have choices to make about whether we return to the same old systems which have been revealed as broken, such as capitalism – or choose another direction…
In her preamble, Arundhati says, and I can’t quote for copywriter reasons and so must paraphrase, but please go and read the full work – that governments who are in charge of the response to the virus pandemic are fond of referring to it as a war and that they mean it literally rather than metaphorically. But if it was really a war, then the US, which has been woefully unprepared for the virus, would be the best prepared with guns and planes, soldiers and bombs.
Arundhati Roy spells out in much more detail than I and with far greater eloquence, the dangers of poor leadership and the human costs that are being engendered. At the end, she describes pandemics throughout history, as portals to a different future where-through we will have choices to make about whether we return to the same old systems which have been revealed as broken, such as capitalism – or choose another direction…