Democracy dies in the shadows, so we must rekindle the light.

The twenty-seventh of this month marks two years since my rectal cancer operation. It also marks the second anniversary since society put itself in sleep mode to lessen social interaction and impede the spread of a deadly airborne Covid virus.

 I am thankful I stand on the right side of the ground because, during those twenty-four months, millions died after losing their battles with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, the fragility of old age, mental illness, or their brush with coronavirus. It wasn’t an easy journey through the shadowlands of cancer. It was a harsh struggle to combat death and then embark on a road to recovery with few supports and little human contact because death or long-term illness lurked in the breath of strangers and friends alike. My hard times were not unusual but a norm for many of us. During these Covid years, everyone fought to stay alive. The struggle was lonely and heroic for anyone sick, stressed, or poor. We all paid a price to remain alive, and like veterans from a terrible war, trauma is now smudged onto our character. Some of us became more aware that they have a best before date, and like Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses decided to “drink life to the leas." Others became stuck in a melancholic, pessimistic rut and asked themselves "Is that all there is,"  like they were singing  Peggy Lee’s song

I am both the Tennyson poem and the Peggy Lee song because this second anniversary of my cancer surgery is simultaneously uplifting and depressing.

I can’t separate my tragedy from the collective cataclysm that our society underwent and still undergoes from the coronavirus pandemic because my rectal cancer was treated during the storm surge of Covid. For me, the two Cs, Cancer and Covid are two barbs on the same tail of destruction.

These past two years have been a long trudge, and I am not out of the woods yet. Physically and emotionally, I am not the same man I was in the before times. My body is weaker. I am less optimistic, for my future and humanity’s future, especially since Russia began its war in Ukraine.

We are in a dark age and democracy is dying in the dusk of economic inequality. I have a hard time believing a news media dominated by the  top five or ten per cent of income earners who tell me society is moving in the right direction just  because they own homes as overpriced as Dutch Tulip Bulbs in 1636. Worldwide, Covid is still killing thousands each day, and long covid has ruined the health of millions. Inadequate vaccination policies have allowed the coronavirus to continue mutating into variants that spread like milkweed spores on the wind, sewing a perpetual pandemic.

And, then after two years of enduring this plague,  Governments ended mask mandates signalling that we were on our own if we wanted to protect ourselves from getting the virus. It wasn't science that told them to do this but politics. Politicians in every capitalistic country turned their backs on the safety of their constituents to keep the profits of their 1% backers booming. 

Today the blood lands of Europe bleed out like it was in the middle of the 20th century. We are experiencing a refugee crisis in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres that is unprecedented since the Second World War or the Colonial wars of conquest in the 17th century.

The times are so bad, so bleak, that everything may feel hopeless.

But I am not bereft of hope. Kindness will never be quelled by evil no matter how hard it tries. Our species is hardwired to be love and give love because our survival depends on it. Even when Hitler, Stalin, Putin, Bush, or Blair unleashed their dogs of war on innocent populations, individuals displayed the courage of compassion in small acts of kindness. We must be like Martin Luther King Jr, who knew he would not see the racial and economic promised land he fought for in the 1960s but still  tried to build a road to it.

So, here is to another year of life for all of us. Hopefully, during that time, each of us can lay a brick or two on the road we must build towards a society, for the many and not the few.