Pandemic Fatigue As We Pass The Gate of The New Year
SubTitle: What’s Next?
Yes there is Pandemic Fatigue
The mask mandates, required proof of vaccination at events and other locations, more booster doses and concerns about the health of children younger than five years.
We live in a tumultuous world with complex geo-political challenges, national and international strifes.
So what’s next in the long term?
Well, God Knows !!!
God knows is a poem written in 1908 by Minnie Louise Haskins (1875–1957) and was included in her small collection of poetry titled The Desert.
Today, in addition to the pandemic, our troubled world faces major challenges including:
a. Effects of climate change especially in developing nations like Madagascar in Africa and Palau in South East Asia. ‘We’re going under’: Palau’s president recently pleaded.
b. The impacts of cyberattacks
c. Balancing the pros and cons of Artificial Intelligence.
c. Widening Gap between developed and developing nations.
d. Possibility of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and its global consequences.
e. Coup d'é-tats in Five African Countries in the past 18 months.
f. North Korea and Iran Nuclear crisis.
Yet, as cloudy as the skies are, they appear to be less stormy and convulsive than they were on the eve of World War II.
In 1939, when the world was dark, King George VI quoted Minnie Louise Haskins’ poem, God Knows in his Christmas broadcast to the British Empire.
The words profoundly moved a country facing the uncertainly of World War II. The speech became one of the king’s most famous and memorable speeches.
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
And he replied:
‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.
So heart be still:
What need our little life
Our human life to know,
If God hath comprehension?
In all the dizzy strife
Of things both high and low,
God hideth His intention.God knows. His will
Is best. The stretch of years
Which wind ahead, so dim
To our imperfect vision,
Are clear to God. Our fears
Are premature; In Him,
All time hath full provision.Then rest: until
God moves to lift the veil
From our impatient eyes,
When, as the sweeter features
Of Life’s stern face we hail,
Fair beyond all surmise
God’s thought around His creatures
Our mind shall fill
Upon catching public attention, the poem came to be known as The Gate of the Year.
From 1919 to 1939, Minnie Louise Haskins worked as a tutor in the Social Science Department at London School of Economics where the senior tutor described her as:
“A woman of unusual capacity and character … a rare understanding and sympathy and infinite patience, combined with a great deal of love and interest in people”.
Today, in the midst of pandemic fatigue, uncertain future, geo-political and socio-economic challenges, we can all use Minnie Haskins’ “understanding, sympathy and infinite patience”.
Patience as we follow the science and await safe and efficacious vaccine for children under the age of five years.
Patience on board aircrafts.
Patience during school board meetings in our various communities and hope for beams of light in the future, putting the pandemic behind us.
