Lessons from the pandemic to ponder - EDITORIAL

During these days of the pandemic people have got used to taking up businesses they have never been associated with. Some people have even shed the bogus air about themselves. Egos have been trimmed. People are more down to earth. Being unemployed and hungry are nothing to be ashamed of now. 

But we did see people who have not learned a lesson from these troubled times. We saw people being impatient and jumping the queue when receiving the vaccination. Some went beyond the frame of decency and fair play and crossed the border in terms of their geographic locations and received vaccinations meant for other people. 
Whatever hardships and pandemics that came our way there will always be people who would want to be labelled as privileged. They would want to be excluded from the societies they live in when all others are severely restricted in lockdown areas. We heard of people who used the less travelled paths to escape from these isolated areas to attend work or get their daily quota of alcoholic beverages or cigarettes.  

Despite these horrible times there were families which had success stories to relate. There have been families which have made it a habit to save a potion of their incomes; hence they weren’t that desperate when the government’s promised stipend didn’t arrive at their doorsteps. 
This is a nation where people who consider themselves as superior would not like the existing system to be changed. It would have been good if members of families, where the breadwinners are doctors, also joined the queue and awaited their turn for the vaccine. 

"Some went beyond the frame of decency and fair play and crossed the border in terms of their geographic locations and received vaccinations meant for other people"

If a section of the society is to receive privileges that must be changed and the whole society must be included in these programmes. The other most painful thing to notice is that the Sri Lankan society can be stubborn and divided even during a national crisis. There is a section of the society which believes that they have to dig in and perform to raise themselves from these difficult times that the pandemic has put them in. 

There is another section of the society which believes that it is the duty of the government to feed and finance them in the face of a disaster. It is the responsibility of each citizen to learn a trade or qualify him or herself in some profession. When this initial training is received the chances of surviving a crisis is much greater. Look at some of the local banks and finance companies that have made record profits despite the pandemic reigning everywhere. 
But the problem lies with the middle income earning families. These are the families that have spent more than they earn and facilitated their spending using credit cards. Media advertisements target these groups. The pandemic has brought along with the doom and the gloom many lessons, but whether these people have ‘woken up from slumber’ put their lives in order is left to be seen. 

So the pandemic doing more than anything else exposed those who can stay afloat and those who would sink during this wave of uncertainty created by the pandemic.
 There are those who still don’t wear a mask and walk about in a irresponsible manner. Sadly this is a country where the people doing ‘good’ haven’t influenced the people whose actions are termed bad.