By: Miran Černec
Slowly a year will pass since the world started struggling with a new coronavirus pandemic. This year many high-profile words about solidarity and humanity, and about how we are supposedly “all in the same boat” have been said at many high-level forums. You know, as we all fight for the same goal, we generously sacrifice our basic rights and freedoms, we humanely let ourselves be locked up in cages like chickens from one lockdown to another – all this, of course, for a good and noble purpose. And look: if we Slovenes have saved a single Slovene life with all the measures that we have been implementing more or less successfully for almost a year, I think it was worth it.
Yet the theory that a pandemic is supposed to bring us closer as humanity, make us more planetary compassionate, and take us to some higher state of egalitarian consciousness does not hold. The facts show otherwise. In 2020, for example, educational economists estimate that at least $68 billion will flow from the pockets of the American middle class to the accounts of the richest 1 percent. Coincidence? Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and other multibillionaires have in any case only became richer in the last year – also at the expense of small and medium-sized businesses whose owners went bankrupt due to the arbitrary closure of the economy. If it were really true that we were “all in the same boat,” these gentlemen would redistribute some of their money seized during the pandemic to the people left without anything, or at least our democratically elected democratic governments in the free West would force them to do so. But I do not think we are going to see this movie. So when we hear mantras how the new coronavirus pandemic is supposed to be an opportunity for a “big reset”, after which humanity will finally – but this time really – unanimously sail into a kind of modern nirvana communism, you should hold on to your wallet. The leaders of this world have long since taken care of their boats (and yachts); and we, Slovenes, can only take care of our own in due course.