Writenow: The Pandemic Voyage.
Having sailed through 2020, just pray we never ever journey another one with damaged sails that almost ran aground the entire world in a rudderless voyage.
Sailing was an underrated expression for the expedition, white water rafting anchored with misadventures would be a more appropriate substitute.
One will never forget this tumultuous year which brought out the best in a few, the worst for some and death for the unfortunate multitudes.
Dubbed the pandemic year, it was studded with continuous eyebrow raisers, heart wrenches and puzzlements without any one Incident outweighing the other.
Days, weeks and months passed by making no sense of whatever was taking place, only fortifying having no control of our destiny.
Our faith in God, Governments, families, friends and esteemed institutions have been litmus tested in this unpleasant odyssey and produced unexpected results.
The world's most powerful nation had the litmus test matching the colour of her President's neck.
He not only failed to wear his damn mask but also failed miserably to put the people above politics, his ego and not relinquishing the presidency after losing the elections.
Surprisingly the western bloc took a mammoth beating from the disease compared to the lesser developed nations.
The first world proved inefficient in handling the crisis, the leadership displayed a lack of assertion as if under a spell of paralysis and therefore the people suffered.
Perhaps, the liberal latitude in democracy restricted control over its denizens to take the WHO's SOP seriously, unlike their authoritarian counterparts, the People's Republic of Communist China.
At the tailend of 2019, China reported the existence of the covid19 virus and the disease spread through the rest of the world like the viralling of an insignificant WhatsApp message.
The question was whether the virus was birthed by a connoisseur's
gastronomical delight of the exotic delicacy of the Wuhan flying fox sauteed in soy sauce or a sinister plot to weaken her adversaries by a deadly disease by disseminating the microscopic lab cultured devils from Wuhan throughout the planet.
A chapter about the Wuhan virus ripped out of a novel by Dean Koontz in 1981 was published in mainstream media which will not only raise eyebrows but also shoot shivers down any spine.
Maybe, it was the CIA that hatched a plan to implicate the Chinese and prophesize Dean Koontz's fiction which backfired severely.
Like insects dropping dead after a round of fumigation, the conspiratorial pandemic began terrorising the rest of the world but strangely not throughout China.
But again, it was a year and an open season for conspiracy theories.
The pandemic not only took lives but also shut down businesses big and small, petroleum transporter ships at one time came to a halt all around the globe waiting for a rescind in merchandise value.
The wind beneath the wings of the airline industry fizzled out to a vacuum grounding both aircrafts and staff.
Tragically employment and employed were words replaced by unemployment, retrenchment, pay severance further giving rise to more words like moratorium, relief allowance and other pathetic ones.
Whatever the cause, the situation brought chaos all over the world setting new norms and standards.
A myriad of events such as the police heavy handedness, attacks on coloured people, control of the south china sea, trade embargoes, cross border incursions and the massive procurement of aircrafts and military equipment by paranoia struck nations made everyday news.
Bad news was a daily dose of inoculation and the element of surprise or awe grew tolerances beyond their usual limits.
Conditional standards like social distancing, wearing of face masks, sanitising hands, movement control, body temperature monitoring, working from home became norms.
These were some of the few examplaries induced as the new culture inculcated into this decade.
A woman's vanity case of the future would include a face mask and a miniature bottle of hand sanitiser listing these with the never leave home without items.
Terrorism was redefined with a Jihad being focused on ridding the pandemic and this time without political or religious agendas.
Ironically, people temporarily stopped fighting their own kind and set their sights to obliterate the new, invisible and lethal enemy that conventional weapons could not destroy.
The warring bravehearts were not armed soldiers in camouflages but incredulously the frontliners with sober coloured uniforms worn by medical personnel.
Side by side along with them the white lab coat scientists raced to create weapons of mass destruction to annihilate the virus.
We now stand on the brink of overpowering the pandemic with the firepower of a vaccine.
This being the fruition of the tireless effort of scientists working around the clock and around the globe.
The death count is currently 1.7 million along with 80 million infected, the experts predict that the normalisation of a calm is expected by March 2021.
Just how would life be without the pandemic, would the new norms replace the old ones and when would the world recover from the aftermath are serious questions to address.
I pray our journey forward is a safe one unlike 2020. ED.