What Should 2021 Look Like?

The future, is an absolute unknown, but it is also a blank canvas on which to design a new way of life for the entire human species. We know that historically infectious diseases like the Plague and the Spanish Flu have spread most efficiently in epochs that witnessed large congregations of humans and conditions of overcrowding, whether in the squalid and crowded Medieval towns and cities of Europe or in the trenches of the Western Front in world war one with soldier infecting soldier only to be shipped out as the war ended in 1918 back home to their respective continents taking the infection with them! Today, we live in an age of excess, an excess of activity and movement that is simply wasteful and inefficient. Travel has never been easier or cheaper, so it’s little wonder that so many do it several times a year. We are not talking of folks whose jobs require they travel, far from it, we are referring to ordinary people, either going off on a mini vacation or going home to see family. It is little wonder then that this particular novel coronavirus found our world especially suitable for the growth and propagation of its own species at the expense of ours!

I was once one of those eager habitual travelers who reveled in this ease of movement. I lived far from home for my work, but the trip home was a short two-hour commute in a 'bus of the air', usually on board an Airbus 320/321 variant, the work horse of the short haul. In fact, 2008/2009, saw me travel back and forth four times in 11 months! I don’t know how millennials see this, but for someone raised in the late 70s and early 80s by parents who were refugees of war and living and working far from their families, I know what it is like to miss someone, I mean really miss them! We were lucky if we went home once every two years for a two or three week visit, in fact, at times we wouldn’t venture home for four years. It’s hard for the young to understand this, as they are so used to booking tickets online and jumping on board planes with little more than a duffle bag wearing sweats, a t-shirt and hoody! In my day, dads wore a suit and tie to travel.

But what has the age of excessive travel given us, certainly more low cost airlines, more people employed in the air travel sector than ever in history, and airport hubs that are constantly crowded with people from every corner of the globe exchanging viruses carried in fine sspray of pittle droplets emanating from unmasked mouths. Airports, the perfect environment for any virus to graduate to the status of global pandemic!

 

We are all eagerly awaiting the vaccines to arrive at our respective countries, to get 70 to 80 percent vaccination coverage, eager to get that herd immunity going so that we can go back to cheap travel and overcrowded airports. In fact, we want to “forget” 2020 ever happened. Well, I can understand that impulse, I really can, except we must never forget 2020 or the Covid 19 pandemic, on the contrary we must remember it and teach its history lessons to generations to come. The year 2020, must be a stand-alone extra-long chapter in every history text printed from this day forth, because forgetting the last great pandemic dubbed Spanish Flu, cost us a lot. It cost us 1.8 million lives over the past year and counting. It cost us a lot in lack of preparedness and in absence of coordination and a global warning mechanism that could have raised the alarm a lot sooner. It cost us time to prepare the vaccine, instead of having active and efficient and well funded vaccine research programs that could quickly pick up the baton so to speak and fast track a targeted covid vaccine in two or three short months. It took us a year, and there are some who think it should have taken longer still and that this is what fast looks like!

 

I can’t countenance any return to what we call normal in 2021 even if we crush this pandemic. Doing that would mean we have learned nothing. We lived lives before 2020 that would have looked bizarre to any human civilization that came before us. The fact is, in the last decade there have never been as many young people from my country at least that have worked abroad to earn a basic living, not to make their fortunes, just to live. They would spend most of their time in their country of employment, but shuttle back and forth, for some, every month, back home to mother’s home cooking. Cheap travel made that possible. Taking vacations has never been easier or cheaper, the growth of low cost carriers made that possible, but it also doubled and quadrupled the amount of pollution pumped into the atmosphere by the airline industry and it meant that airport hubs were constantly busy and overcrowded. If we return to that pattern of life, we are almost certain to see new pandemics emerge in the years ahead, and pollution from air travel would make life of our planet less pleasant. So, change is needed, and a new way of life has to emerge that is safer and healthier and less polluting.

 

About now, some of you would be thinking “hang on a minute, what about the thousands employed in the hospitality and air travel sectors, won’t hundreds of thousands become unemployed?” In short, yes, it is inevitable as the whole economy shrinks and people travel less, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The onus in that case would be on governments to re-distribute resources once taken up by hospitality and air travel and put it to good use elsewhere, as well as retrain many former employees in these industries to take up different yet equally fulfilling careers. 

Think of what the world needs more of. Food probably tops the list followed by medicine as well as an efficient global transportation system that would reduce cost. Imagine a massive airport being demolished and an organic farm and winery built in its place. Imagine the melting down of thousands of planes to build hospital beds and wheel chairs. Imagine money wasted on needless travel abroad spent at home exploring the lesser travelled to or neglected beauty spots at home. Such is a world that would be far friendlier, far nicer to live in. It would be a world in which we spent less time going places and more time enjoying the people we have around us, a life less rushed, less spent seeking new horizons and greener pastures, and more spent building solid home economies and happy families. Just imagine what a world that would be like!