IT’S not a second or third wave of the virus, but a wave of sorrow that envelops us today! If you feel sad and depressed right now, and can’t understand why, then join billions of others who feel the same, and why not?
Right now, most of us are staring at the executioner’s axe, not knowing when cruel virus will strike, how it will, and who it will bring down.
Day after day, we hear of loved ones dying, that we have begun dreading the phone ring, just as many decades ago we shivered when we heard the midnight cry, “Telegram!” outside our doors.
You and I are entitled to these feelings of doom! Between 1939 and 1945, a world war raged, and just as today we wait with baited breaths for the death knock, citizens hid with dread, in bomb shelters, or trembled with anxiety, hearing a neighbour’s loved one had died at the front. The world went through six long years of gloom! But what did they feed on?
Hope! Yes hope, their leaders would use strategy that would outwit the enemy. Hope that America would finally join the war and hope that days of peace would soon appear.
And when peace did come, nations vowed that never again would they go through the same sad experience. And this resolve has kept us from waging war at the drop of a hat as once happened.
But slowly, a generation has gone by without know this terrible uncertainty. We have never experienced this sad feeling of dread, of fearing our homes could be rampaged and loved ones killed in front of our eyes.
But this pandemic could be that eye-opener we need!
Covid’s slaughter could provide us a huge glimpse of acts of war when loved ones are killed, maimed and butchered on the battle front.
Yes, it’s the same feeling, but unlike the invisible virus, there the enemy is our own brother or sister, maybe slightly different in the language they speak, the way they worship or the colour of their skin!
Do we need same sadness to envelope us as willy, crafty political leaders, greedy for power, incite us, make us suspicious of one another and goad us to draw blood? Today, as we go through this period of sadness, let us freeze the feeling and vow we will never allow ourselves or our children to suffer such pangs again.
Even as hope grows brighter and a multitude of vaccines lend a helping hand, let us grasp that hand but promise ourselves that we, like those after World War II, have felt enough, and will not allow ourselves to succumb to this Wave of Sorrow again.
Let this wave of sorrow strengthen our resolve, to throw out all those who continue making us sad through violence and acts of war..!
