WHAT YOU ARE I WAS, WHAT I AM YOU WILL BE

It’s a new world and, once this pandemic is over, it will be a newer world. Maybe today’s young are nothing like the young of previous generations. Maybe, we should leave them alone

- AA PATAWARAN

Before the pandemic, I honestly didn’t envy the young, though I was surrounded by them and, by young, I mean 20 and up to the age it dawned on me that I was old—48. But now, I am changing my mind. I can’t wait to see what this life will become once the pandemic is done with us. Already, in my view, it is a changed world, but it has yet to emerge from this dark period into a new light, like dirty laundry fresh out of the washing machine.

I am more interested, though, in what promises to be our version of the Renaissance coming out of the Dark Ages, with a pandemic, the Black Death, making it inevitable. Don’t get me wrong: I won’t say that the past 200 years would be anything like the Dark Ages, otherwise known as the Middle Ages or the Medieval Times, during which, after the fall of the Roman Empire, a wealth of recorded events and evidence of human feats in art, science, engineering, and technology was lost. That’s why historians call it the Dark Ages, you know.

It hosted the two World Wars, not to mention all these other dark episodes in human history, such as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, but the 20th century was also a time of great triumph. We learned to fly. We landed on the moon. We changed our view of women so much that we made them heads of state—Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Corazon Aquino, Benazir Bhutto. We have eradicated many of what our predecessors thought of as the wrath of God, polio, for instance, and small pox, even leprosy and tuberculosis in some smaller measure. Let’s not even talk about radio, TV, airconditioning and refrigeration, electrification, and the Internet. I’ll have to use up this entire column just to list everything down.