Safe Zones & Morality Plays

by Shujaat Mirza

Courtesy: Orijit Sen

One understands the gravity of the situation and that lives are at stake and each false step can lead on to a bit by bit calamitous situation.

One understands that the need to self-protect and auto-immunize is very strong in all of us as we try and consciously avoid people and places from a safe distance.

One understands the panic and pandemonium around this pandemic because for once it is real, palpable and close to the skin.

One understands that issues of mortality and our limited time on the planet face us in the eye.

So let’s also let it sink that since we have no idea how much we might live or what our plans are made of, that we need to be humane, gentle and not rush to demonize each carrier who by mistake has infected others or who hasn’t taken his duties seriously enough to quarantine oneself, like we did during the plagues in medieval times or during the first sequence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and stigmatize and become socio-ethico-sermonizers. The need for caution has to be highlighted and faults corrected , but with due empathy and leniency, as we cannot socially ostracize them, even if mistakes have been committed.

We cannot ever let any combined struggle for the good leave us worse off in terms of our carriage as vehicles of a shared humanity; for the common grounds are where we share our journeys and stories as strands of a continuous and contiguous weave. As that path leads to detentions and separations. Something which we already fight against. Let’s keep this little bit of humanity alive and forgive lapses and not name and shame or cultivate a safe zone. For nothing is safe if we start delivering instant judgements and morality plays, not even our sanity and ability to filter the right from the wrong.

© Shujaat Mirza 2020