Ignorance is Bliss: Covid-19
You’ve seen death all around you for over a year now. How could you not try to pretend that what’s happening isn’t real, when the situation is so grave? Ignorance can keep you safe during times like these. It’s understandable: if you don’t feel saddened by the drastic increase in deaths that have occurred, you spare your own suffering, right? But ignorance is also dangerous, ignorance is cruel.
In this way, there seem to be 2 main sacrifices that come with choosing to be ignorant (or to lack sympathy). The first being a loss of humanity. After all, what are we without sympathy? Without empathy? But maybe that’s just a sugarcoated way of saying that you can’t really be a decent person without experiencing sympathy — so be it.
The second sacrifice is more specific to our times. With contemporary ignorance, you hear people say, “Well, I’ll be fine if I get sick, so why do I need to wear a mask? Why should I have to get vaccinated?” This sacrifice is not a blow to your character. This is a potential sacrifice of another human life. (Yes, a human life other than your own.)
In this scenario, having sympathy should be the bare minimum. Maybe it wasn’t your grandparent or your at-risk friend who was taken by Covid, but what if it had been? Scratch that — the fact that it wasn’t someone who was important to you shouldn’t change it. They were human, and that should be enough.
So, do you not know that? Or do you know it and just not care?
You see, there are times when we feel everything and times when we feel nothing, but so often the former leads to the latter. It’s times like these when some of us begin to feel an intense whirlpool of anger, that trickles into a deep sadness, that evaporates into emotional paralysis. If not all of us can feel basic sympathy for others, what is left? So, we begin to feel nothing as we can’t bear to feel everything.
So here I am now. Now I feel so little as I watch needless deaths from afar throughout this pandemic, and that’s when a type of guilt tugs at my mind.
Am I the ignorant one now?
