When we look back at a great historical event, most of us are aware of the major happenings: the riots, the deaths, the battles and so on. We know, for example, that WW1 had its high points and the low points and, above all, we know that soldiers fought and died in unimaginably horrific conditions and that these conditions and the horror of them were captured by writers and poets during and after the conflict. It is, in fact, these poems and novels, that have shaped our view of the conflict and help us understand what it was like for the those at the sharp end. Films like 1917 and All Quiet on the Western Front have also contributed to our current understanding. We now know that, for us Brits, war began in 1914 and that it officially ended in 1918. Yes, we know these things because we have studied the war at school and we have seen the films and read the books. In other words, looking back gives the war the qualities of a film or a novel with a beginning, a middle and an end. And that is how we understand it.
No such luxury of retrospect for those who lived through the war. They had no idea what was going to happen. They did not know if they would survive. They did not know that it would end in 1918 and they certainly had no idea concerning how it would end! For those who lived through it, it was always in the here and now, a constantly shifting reality without the context that retrospect can bring. In other words, those who play a role in a historical event never understand its real significance or its context. It always takes time and the perspective that time gives us to fully grasp the knock-on effects.
The Corona pandemic that we are currently experiencing is, in this respect, similar to WW1. We don't know when it will end. We don't know how it will end. In effect, we don't know who will survive and who will die. It is highly likely that the post-Corona world will be very different from the pre-Corona world but we have no idea what these differences will look like. And, in years to come, our grand children might ask, "What did you do during the great pandemic, grandpa?"
So, what will we tell them? We will tell them those things that returning soldiers said in 1918/19, that a lot of good people died, that we just got on with the job at hand. We will tell them that we were not heroes. We will tell them that we were just doing what was expected of us in a time of crisis. But we, living through this crisis on a daily basis, will not know how far the emergence of the coronavirus will exacerbate current tensions both in the US and the UK or how these tensions will play out. That is something that future generation will be able to tell us about.
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