Sense of the Common.

 All over the world governments are trying to get to grips with the Corona/Covid19 pandemic, balancing between economic interests and healthcare. 

It’s a 'hit and miss' social experiment trying to minimize infection rates and keeping an economy going, there are success stories but in the main, most of us are stilling feeling around in the dark. 

Nobody (as yet) really knows completely how to stop the spread, we could all just stay indoors and only go out to get food but then the world wide economy would just collapse, so we have to have these ‘hit and miss rules’. Stay home, unless you really have to go out for exercise or your job, keep away from large gatherings but if you can’t wear a mask, non-essential businesses like bars and restaurants should close but they can still do a take-away service and as many of us as possible should work from home… that’s about the sum of it. 

It’s not a problem that we can solve with a # hashtag, likes, or retweets. Fake news doesn’t help, politicians stuck between the ‘party policy’ and telling people the truth do not help, I guess that we’ll just have to rely on our own common sense and let science get on with finding the cure. 

Relying on our ‘common sense’ (which means a sense of the ‘common’, common being the community), is what raises most eyebrows. We talk about the collective ‘common sense’ as if it’s a joke- well sometimes it is- but we need to nurture it, believe in it. We need to work on our ‘common sense’ - feeling of community, a belief in ‘common good’ would benefit us in more ways than just battling Corona. From litter, rubbish, and dog poo, to solidarity with others in need, poverty, or people that just need a good chat. 

Of course, to get to that stage we need to take a step back from all the shiny little screens we stare at most hours of our waking lives and realize that real life is only to be found offline. We can find like-minded people online, ideas that interest us or interests that give us ideas (see what I did there) all can be found online, but real human interaction can only be found off line. 

Saying all this makes me realize that the more we stay isolated, locked down or in quarantine we not only flatten the virus curve, we are also in danger of flattening the common sense curve as well. We humans need to interact and not with algorithms. We need human contact, there is a reason that ‘solitary confinement’ is used as a punishment, lack of human contact doesn’t help our sense of the ‘common good’ or our sanity. When isolated we think more and more about our own situation and less and less about the others until we dislocate from the rest of society. 

So how to balance that? Big question. We have our little ‘contact bubbles’ small groups who we are allowed to see and meet with, these are our link to the rest, these small bubbles are our ‘sanity bubbles’ strengthen these links. 

A good thing about tech is that it gives us possibilities like Skype, Zoom or other video apps that give us (at least) a live link to friends and family we cannot see due to restrictions. It’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing, at the moment we should grab every opportunity to stay connected however it might be. 

Whatever governments decide (and in Belgium we have loads of governments) we should hold up to the light of criticism, but in the meanwhile, life goes on and the fight against the spread of Corona/Covid19 continues, and for that, we need a ‘sense of the common’, common sense.

When all this is behind us we can squabble and fight about who done what and what was right and what was wrong, our judgments will be through the elections. But at the moment there is a fight to be won, a fight for the ‘common good’, and for that we all need to be on the same side. Team human.