Make the right call - Surreal Times - Modern Man - Lee Patrick Wilson

I sadly recall watching the documentaries of the tragic Boxing Day tsunami years after the event, such a terrible scenario to be faced with as so many lives where swept away in an instant.

But it wasn’t an instant the wave took a few hours from the quake happening to the sea wall crashing against the land, but most people never knew that the tsunami was coming and instead carried on relaxing, enjoying their holidays or getting on with their day to day lives oblivious to the danger they where in. I recall video footage of a few people, many even, who seeing the sea retreat from its normal break with land and the newly exposed seabed then walking the seabed out away from land, further and further towards the retreating sea, until, a huge wall of water appears on the horizon and then too far from land, too far from safety, and with the wall of water fast approaching, faced with the sudden realisation that a tsunami was upon them and death rode with it. In their unintentional ignorance they had only hours earlier ventured beyond safety, inadvertently sealing their own fate. Faced with the wall and the ocean fast closing in on them, some ran at first, then stopped and faced the water, one man I recall calmly sat down and faced the wave ready to embrace death in the final minutes of his newly found reality. I consider the coronavirus the impending threat that is now so well publicised, the advice and now law from the government to help us, to save us, and see the way people are still behaving, the denial they are in, the reluctance to do what’s asked of them, and I can’t help but drawing comparisons between them and the man on the beach, who wasn’t bad or wicked but made a fundamentally wrong decision at exactly the wrong time and paid the ultimate price for this.

Anyone now making the wrong decision still in denial acting as though reality is the same as all of the years before this, or thinking I’m fit! it won’t take me down! make a similar fundamentally wrong decision at exactly the wrong time. But unlike the man on the beach the wrong decision now doesn’t only affect them, they don’t necessarily put their own life at risk, maybe they are fine and walk away and never know that their actions killed a vulnerable person, a mother or father, a grandparent, a child, anyone with a health problem or in old age. Yet deep down they will know, somewhere deep inside beyond their own bullshit and shallow reasoning, they will know that in a time of crisis they where too selfish, too ignorant, to do the simple thing asked of them, the right thing, the human thing: To stay at home and isolate, to reduce the spread, to take themselves out of the equation, to then not have an accident or injury, to not cause traffic, to just stay safe until the ones who are educated and at the forefront of human intellect can cure us all and save the elderly and vulnerable. The people who do this, behave so selfishly, they won’t be the only ones who know what they did, friends, neighbours and families they will know too and that shame will stay with them, easily denied and forgiven, but not so easily forgotten and I hope we can all change before it’s to late, but I fear it already is.