Corona and her sisters

At the beginning of the sixties I was a student at the French Secondary Institute in Tangier, Morocco. I remember an exceptional day that we stood among a group of students as if on our heads a bird, and we were discussing the mathematics teacher in the institute's foyer - after all lessons were suspended - about what we should expect and do when the atomic war erupts between the Russians and the Americans.

At the time, the world was living in the most serious crisis after America imposed the embargo on Cuba and the Soviets' intention to break it by force, and the people around us began storing supplies just as we see them doing today. We breathed a sigh of relief as we heard that the Russian fleet bound for Cuba was reinserted. The scientist - who actually lived on the edge of the abyss - would continue to be a place where we would return to the study of mathematics.

After this "catastrophe", we had to endure, for two decades, countless and countless films of the end of the world, all describing the upcoming nuclear war, and how we will live among the city rubble and fight over the last carcass. In the 1980s, the fear obsession turned into an HIV epidemic.

I mention an article in a medical journal in which a respected colleague demonstrates that the end of humanity with the epidemic will be no later than a year ... two thousand. At that time, I was teaching at the Faculty of Medicine in Sousse and headed the Department of Collective Medicine, which was following the development of the disease, and when I appointed a student to the subject of a doctoral thesis about the attitudes and behavior of the public towards the disease and patients, I almost asked him - after he returned to me with the results - not to publish data for what we discovered.

The disease was in the minds of the majority of ordinary people and they are calling for the implementation of the utmost isolation on the injured, and some of them even went to claim to kill them. The strangest thing was the position of the authorities at the time, and a law was enacted - which I vehemently opposed it - authorizing the imprisonment of patients until they recovered, and in that case we had no treatment at that time.

Then we attacked the premonition of entering the 2000s and how all computers would stop working, because of a defect in their programming that did not take into account the passage from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century. How cracked our heads with this story, and how planes will land over trees, and power plants will be crippled ... etc! How many people have lived the night of the passage to the year 2000 and they expect the sky to fall on their heads!

Talk about and embarrassment about the fear of climate change and the program, according to some, as we entered the sixth stage of extinction and the annihilation of mankind after the earth became unable to house other than ants and cockroaches.

Let's put the dates side by side: the 1962 Cuban missile crisis; 1980 the beginning of the HIV crisis; 1999 the terror of computer interruption; 2020 the current Corona virus crisis. There is, then, almost every twenty years a huge crisis that differs from all the crises that history has known, since its effects are no longer local or regional, but include humanity and the world.

Now, look carefully at the last twenty years, and you will discover that three major threats to global health have exploded: the SARS epidemic in 2002; the Mers epidemic in 2012; and the Ebola epidemic in 2013.

In order for the picture to be complete, you only have to put these political and health crises in the broader context, that is, the suffocating crisis that the planet is going through and mainly the major fires (Méga feu): Portugal 2017; Sweden, California 2018; Brazil, Congo, Russia 2019; Australia 2020.

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When you put all these facts side by side in search of the common denominator between them, it will be like someone examining a phenomenon in two ways: the acceleration of history, and what I called in a book issued to me in the year 1986 titled 'Let my country wake up' (found on my website): "The value of the bet increases."

It is not a matter of exaggeration or ostentation to say that no generation - of the thousands of generations that have followed on the surface of the Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago - is more fortunate than the one I belong to. How not, and my generation is the one who witnessed with his own eyes a minute after a minute the first person landed on the surface of the moon, and the first probe on the surface of Mars, and I am not talking about the revolution he experienced in the fields of science, technology, industry, transportation and means of communication.

It is a stroke of luck, like attending the discovery of fire, then the start of the agricultural revolution, then the industrial revolution in Omar at the age of the human being. To further bestow her blessings on my generation, the divine will or coincidences of history made him live unbelievable events, from the perspective of a historian who follows the development of political and societal systems.

In these seven decades that I lived, I witnessed the collapse of the French and English colonial empires, the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the decline of communism, the progression of democracy, the demise of the star of the West, the retreat of racist theories, the election of a black president in America, and the acquisition of women for the bulk of their rights, not to mention the issuance of the first document that all of humanity unanimously agreed upon, not to It is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As if the time that needed hundreds of thousands of years to pass from the first civilization based on the discovery of fire, to the second civilization that was built on the agricultural revolution, and it took ten thousand years to pass the industrial revolution that represented the third civilization; only a few decades ago passed to the fourth civilization, the civilization of information that We are also accelerating it. No one knows what the features of the Fifth Civilization nor any new revolution will build their foundations; the only certainty is that we are on the cusp of it.

The other side of the phenomenon is what I call "an escalating bet." Why did the past generations not overcome poverty and disease, as did the new generations? She was not stupid or less human than us, but her potential was limited. Why didn't past generations destroy the planet as we do it today? They were not smarter or better than the new generations, but their capabilities were limited.

The rule is that the scientific and technological boom - which distinguished the last two centuries from hundreds of thousands of years of human history - raised the effectiveness in the ability to build to the highest levels, and also brought the same ability to demolish to terrifying levels.

He envisioned a gambler whose experience of playing at an amazing speed is increasing, but he plays with a world whose first concern is balance. He does not give the right except to take the left. Here he achieves - time after time - imaginary profits that he did not even dare to dream about. Suddenly, the loss comes when he is in the euphoria of victory, as he loses in one game the bulk of what gained in addition to his right hand.

Whenever this gambler continues to play, he has accumulated profits, followed by losses of the same size, and the option is to stop playing or accept the rule of the game, which is that the size of the losses will be the size of the profits, and that it may end up pieces over a block of rubies and diamonds.

See how control of atomic energy gave us electricity, then cancer-carrying nuclear radiation and bombs capable of wiping life from Earth. And see how the employment of millions of workers in the coal, petroleum, and automotive industries has resulted in hundreds of millions out of poverty, and then the global warming disaster. He then looked at how the discovery of antibiotics had enabled - for half a century - bacterial diseases that had repeatedly ravaged societies and nations over the past centuries.

But how did the same drugs lead to the selection of bacteria that are resistant to all these antibiotics, and these bacteria may cause future epidemics more dangerous than all we knew. You do not extend your control over the depths of the tropical forests, and invest with all the greed of their wood, without contacting - voluntarily or involuntarily - with chimpanzees and bats, so you return to the small village and then to the vast world with HIV and Ebola.

Where can we enjoy all the benefits of the Internet without ever being exposed to the possibility of stopping its services with the disastrous consequences that we cannot envision in size, and electronic warfare at its beginning? From where do we have the ease of moving to the farthest place in the world without this also leading to the spread of this virus and others, the spread of wildfire?

This is how we ignored or ignored an axiomatic law stipulating that nothing in this world is free ... and that each price has a price ... and that there are no positives without negatives (and no negatives without positives, as noted by the engineer, Islammo Ould Maaloum, who checks thankfully from all my articles and from Chicago This article is commenting on: Corona accomplished, within two weeks, what all human endeavors in the area of ​​pollution reduction had failed to achieve.

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In sum, Corona and her sisters are apparent to the articulated stage that humanity is going through as a result of the acceleration of history and the increase in the value of the bet, a stage that no one knows whether it will stop, when and in what condition. All we are sure of is that we will face in the future with other pandemics, whether they are epidemics of germs and viruses bred inside hospitals and laboratories, or natural disasters as a result of global warming, a collapse in the banking system such as what happened in 2008, or Internet wars that may destroy the economy more than any nuclear war.

What can be learned so far from the experiences that must be invested in facing the huge challenges that lie ahead? There is a real fear for our future as a result of the actions of these crises, reminiscent of the time, depth, and gravity of the dark part of human nature.

Look at the sheer amount of stupidity and racism to bullish some of the Asians accused of transmitting the infection; look at the struggle of people everywhere over food storage, they are not interested in anything else; and look at the escalation of the wave of weapons storage that has ravaged the United States since the beginning of the current epidemic, as if the people Prepare for a war of all against all.

There is - fortunately - real hope that we can meet all the challenges. It is not by chance that we have overcome all the ordeals, and we will surpass, with God's help, the ordeal. It is these crises that shape the best of us as well. It not only highlights the values ​​of solidarity and impact, but also stimulates intelligence and will as always great challenges do, and it does not matter if fear is the primary driver.

Imagine if the cinema did not play its role in the sixties and seventies - through horrific movies - in sensitizing the peoples to the dangers of nuclear war, would these people have put enough pressure on their rulers, so that all the caveats would be put in place and control over the mechanisms to prevent the disaster would begin?

What is certain is that it was the wave of panic that swept the world after the emergence of HIV, which mobilized the funds and scientific energies that were able to limit the spread of the epidemic, and enables us today to talk about recovery from the disease. The same is true of the rapid siege of the epidemics of SARS, Meyers and Ebola.

What we experienced in the last decade of fears of fear about the impact of climate change, was and remains the primary incentive for all that states and civil society institutions seek to limit the consequences of the phenomenon, or at least prepare for it and adapt to it. It is proven that the acceleration of history and the increase in the value of the bet - the multiplication and the growing significance of the dangers and challenges - will impose a great effort on all of us on three levels:

- The psychosocial level: the present generations - especially future generations - must be prepared for rapid adaptation to the emergency and unexpected, and to release the illusion of stability, because the crisis is the only permanent thing in the new situation, and the future will not end with a crisis except to hand us over to another.

- Cultural intellectual level: a new generation of intellectuals, intellectuals and media people is required to deal with innovative ideas and very different methodologies with unprecedented problems of unprecedented complexity, to search - with unprecedented humility - for a package of solutions that are all present in the womb of the future, not in the recipes that are obsolete.

Local and global political level: Every authority does not engage in protection schemes for the short, medium and long term, it is not irresponsible. What is required - especially in our very fragile Arab countries - is to adopt tight plans to provide a strategic reserve of medicine, food and fuel, in order to face climatic disasters that will multiply, and epidemics of unknown viruses that will surprise us in the future, as this pandemic surprised us.

Strategic options remain hostage to the development of conditions: Will liberalism collapse as communism collapsed before or after a major disaster? Any new concepts by which we replace the idol idols that we have worshiped for the last two centuries (progress, development, growth, control of nature); science with God and work with man.

May God protect you in these critical days of chronophobia, while the virus is capable of it. It also saved you from optimism and pessimism, as the best position is that recommended by the Palestinian writer Emile Habibi: "the pessimist!"