A rare display of optimism

I am sitting here in my office, overwhelmingly convinced that everything is going to be all right. I know everyone is scared, and I know the situation is going to get worse, possibly much worse, before it gets better, and I know a lot of people are going to face heartache, loss and financial despair, but I just think we’re going to get through it.

Amazing things are happening. Amazing advancements are being made. Amazing personalities are shining through from previously unnoticed people.

Human individuals succumb to disease, but humanity itself is resilient.

Plagues have ravaged centuries past and, even without modern medicine and advanced scientific understanding, Mankind found a way to overcome them.

I think I’m right in saying that World War One, and the Spanish flu that followed hot on its heels, wiped out one third of the world’s population in a decade. No family was unaffected. But society survived and recovered.  

World War Two took tens of millions of lives. Most countries brought in rationing. In Britain, cold winters after the end of the war ruined crops and meant some food was still scarce into the 1950s.

Britain, and all other nations, survived.

This may be a three-month affair, it may linger on over the Summer, it may all be over by Christmas or it may drag on indefinitely, as we crawl through 18 months of controlled existence until a worldwide vaccine is available.

We just don’t know.

But what I do know, today, is how I feel, and today I feel (foolishly?) hopeful.

RC 1-4-20