Okay, the world seems a lot less shiny and promise-filled than it did even twenty years ago. It’s hard not to view Covid-19 as the inevitable result of our wilful abuse of nature, or to despair for our future and the future of the planet.
But it’s worth defending the achievements previous generations fought for long and hard, even if their benefits still fail to extend to everyone.
Here in the UK we are living though a pandemic in an era of:
safe drinking water
antibiotics and antivirals
the NHS
modern science, including virology and epidemiology
the internet
PPE (setting aside the issues affecting the NHS, most if not all of us can fashion a basic face-covering)
access to soap and over-the-counter medicines including pain relief
Most of these are tangible things and we don’t tend to question the need to pay for them. But the same is true for
public service broadcasting
investigative journalism
Imagine living through a pandemic in previous centuries, or through this one if you were reliant for information on Trump’s Tweets, Fox News and The Sun newspaper. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year describes wave after wave of rumour and counter-rumour as late seventeenth-century London was ravaged by the plague. Of course we have rumours aplenty today, but we also have BBC Reality Check and brave journalists willing to challenge our leaders when they utter untruths. So pay your licence fee with pride. Take out a subscription to a quality newspaper. Don’t take your information on C-19 from social media or your friends.
Trust experts.
