The Kingdom of Fear Is Here
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
If ever there was a kingdom of fear in the world, we are living it now.
There are more than 7 billion people on this planet. The death toll from the Pandemic of Coronavirus has, so far, been around 7 thousand. That, in mathematical terms, works out to less than one thousandth of one percent. That many people die in road accidents in the world in 24 hours. Much more fall prey to gun-related violence in just a few countries.
Nobody cries any tears for victims of road accidents, or gun violence or, for that matter, other man-made disasters. Those are taken as ground realities of our world. They are best shrugged off like specks of dirt from our shoes at the end of a long day.
So, why is there such a hullabaloo, such an uproar, so much consternation over the coronavirus pandemic?
Granted that there’s a global epidemic on our hands. It has to be granted when WHO, the UN watchdog saddled with the onerous task to oversee, globally, health of the planet’s people, so declares—as it did last March 7.
One wonders, however, if WHO and its professionals had any idea that their matter-of-fact pronouncement would trigger an unprecedented avalanche of excitement and concern the world over.
Not that there haven’t been outbreaks of medical emergencies of this ilk before. In our living memory, there was this Sars Virus that broke out in Africa in 2009. But the focus of world attention on that epidemic wasn’t even one per cent of what coronavirus has triggered. Let’s not, here, get into the debate of whether this pandemic of concern is witting or unwitting in its provenance.
But, putting it mildly, the world has been agog since the moment WHO pronounced its verdict of coronavirus epidemic being of the proportions of a pandemic.
Without the need to put on one’s thinking cap it could be said that two factors stand out as the causes of this global tsunami of excitement over the pandemic. The first is the combined role and impact on our minds of the social media and the global information or news media of our age.
In a world where transmission of news—coupled with instant analysis and expert opinion from those who claim to be gurus in their respective fields—has become a game of seconds, not even minutes, it’s a given fact that listeners and viewers of instant news would also be influenced by them. That’s the primary purpose of news bulletins and commentaries: capture people’s attention.
We, the people addicted to receiving our news from radio or/and television have—even the best of us—become, involuntarily, their hostages. It would, in fact, be hard to deny that most of us have been transformed—unwittingly, may be—into gullible hostages.
How many of us, let’s be honest, could argue that we aren’t gullible when hardly one per cent, at best, feel the need to sift chaff from grain. How many of us feel, at all, the need to sift and thrash the news drilled into our ears, day in and day out?
The biggest blight of the age of instant news and analysis is that it has dulled the minds of their listeners and viewers. So most of us, have unwittingly become like robots and accepting whatever command is given by news channels, whose sole concern is to increase their number of audiences so their rating would go up, correspondingly.
Another blight of dulled minds is insensitivity and short attention span. We get so engrossed in the cavalcade of instant news that, quite often, we don’t remember that what is being intoned at this moment in time is just the opposite of what was drilled into our ears an hour ago or a day before. Such is the effect of river-like flow of news on human minds; it quickly washes away the memory bank.
The second reason, as weighty and important, is the provenance of coronavirus: China. There couldn’t be a worse service to suffering humanity than to give a racial twist to the crisis bedeviling the global community.
That the West, on the whole, and Europe, in particular, have been slow to get off the block in their collective responsibility to fight off the coronavirus challenge is a matter of concern. The horrendous spike in virus infections in countries like Italy, France and Spain should be of shame to their leadership and their concern for public health. They were slow in awakening to the danger knocking at their door and, as a consequence of it, are making heavy weather of the belated repair work.
To the delight of this scribe—and also presumably of most of our readers—the virus toll in Pakistan is mercifully low. This is all the more welcome given the abysmal state of healthcare system in Pakistan and the paucity of resources at the disposal of those given the task of combating the menace. Let’s pray it stays on the low side and doesn’t spike.
The response of our Arab ‘brothers’ to the pandemic is, as usual, knee-jerk. Planning in advance has never been our brothers’ strong suit. No surprise, therefore, that they were not ready, physically or viscerally to deal with the challenge sprung before them. The initial response is typically that of a camel: bury the head in the sand dune and hope the desert storm will blow away. So, shutting down even the places of prayer for up to one month—as in the case of UAE—is their best foot forward. What a calamity to the faithful. Where would the slide of the Arabs be halted. Hopefully, before the abyss.
The fear of the unseen virus is driving much of the world nuts. Behavior and responses never seen before is the new global norm. Nobody seems ready to hazard a guess as to when the blight will be gone. That may be a risky undertaking. But in the teeth of all the excitement and uncertainty, the Believers in the ultimate power and privilege of the Unseen Almighty should take heart from their belief in the infinite mercy of the Greatest Equalizer. He will not be unkind, even to an ungrateful mankind.
- K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
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