## 11 Five years ago

Do you remember what we did five years ago? It was during the COVID19/SARS CoV2 crisis. In France, we had to make our famous self-passport to go outside, to buy food, because it was a global lockdown... I was in a permanent remote work before my most important exam. And my father had just died before this crisis. One of my cats was very sick and had a stroke. It was a matter of months. So many souvenirs!

At work there were no masks to protect us and some of my colleagues had to stay with very cheap protection. Then it was a signposted route in every corridor, on every pavement. No more than one person in the lift, two people in a meeting room and one person at each table in the staff restaurant, 2 or 3 metres away from the others. We felt the danger of falling ill, of being contaminated. The danger was palpable because we lost Philippe, a gentle and kind colleague, always happy... contaminated by his son. Schools were a major source of contamination. Many old people had died in old people's homes and it was a nightmare for nurses and care assistants. No vaccines for months and no planes in the sky.

The cities were so deserted. I loved it with lots of animals in the streets, the silence and the happiness of not hearing anything in the garden. But it was OK for me because I was not alone, I had a garden, some shops next to me and everything I needed. It was easy to communicate with the rest of the family. I had contacts with distant cousins and old friends. At the same time, it was very difficult for some colleagues to be alone at home or, on the contrary, too many in a small place. I could imagine it when I saw the buildings next to my house, with small and old flats and nothing to do, for unemployed people who were much more, and the difficulties of going to work for all this "first line", as we used to call the essential jobs, the ones that are always underpaid. Nothing has changed.

Now the restaurants are closing. The state loans were easily repaid by the banks and the big companies, not by the small shops and the people who couldn't work for months because they weren't "essential". The famous "magic money" has often helped the wrong people and forgotten so many others who are now unemployed and sometimes homeless. Poverty is the consequence of a time when the rich got richer. Great psychological shocks always favour the worst profiteers. Yes, five years ago there were some happy souvenirs and so many sad moments with bad feelings in the head. I have seen many people cheat by not respecting the rules, by not protecting themselves, by not restricting themselves, by not vaccinating themselves afterwards, and we will never really be able to measure the consequences of these good or bad choices.

What we can see today is that many children and young people today have psychological problems. Is it just because of anxiety, social networks, as many people say? Is it just because we're looking at something that didn't interest us before? I don't know? I just know that as someone who was alone in my childhood, it's easier to live in a society that divides and isolates us. Fear of the environment is something real for our young people, because it seems difficult now to get a good job, to buy a house or even to rent one. Add to that the fear of epidemics and the result was like a bomb. We pointed the finger at young people as being responsible for the clusters... It is a difficult truth, but we are very "western country" centric. Some young countries have not had the same problems, and when I talk to people in South-East Asia, they are very optimistic. Is it just because their situation is getting better and they're used to monsoons? No, they also have more cyclones and heavier rains. It seems to be more cu
ltural, but it's not the same in China, Korea or Japan. 

If we now laugh at some of these moments, we seem to have forgotten the millions of dead, fathers, mothers, girls and sons, grandfathers and grandmothers, ... We'll never know who or what the zero patient was, and who cares? Pangolins or human research, it was the equivalent of the Spanish flu for the 20th century. We no longer protect ourselves against new diseases or flu, as if nothing had happened. It's like a global amnesia, if only we could forget our traumas, our deaths, ... And for "long covid19", all the persistent symptoms, it's still denial and ignorance. If history teaches us nothing about wars, it's the same with illnesses. And sometimes I'm almost hoping for a new epidemic to remind us how pathetic we are, us, human beings.

2Dɛ
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