``88'' is a Great Number Except for This

Sunday, 1940hrs as at now. SIN city.

The sky is confusingly dark---it isn't clear if it is just the night, or rain is imminent. The weather is still muggy, possibly due to the stillness of the air, the interior temperature recorded as 31°C dry-bulb.

Ludicrousness has finally fallen in with one of the greatest daily spikes in cases throughout the saga that is COVID-19 in SIN city. It simultaneously affects and does not affect me---I am a hermit this year, and with it come the unnatural protection from consistent physical isolation. My mental state waxes and wanes depending on stimulus and the level of despair of the future that I feel on any particular time. The pressure isn't really on me, but I can still feel it.

The city itself can feel it. Each time an overly optimistic announcement about how COVID-19 is contained is made, the city reacts with an inflamed response in the form of a spike of cases that come from a previously unmanaged loophole. After more than a year of actively managing this fracas, it seems that while much has been learnt, much more about human nature hasn't been mastered, despite the demonstration of strongly authoritarian tendencies in many of the control measures.

Resentment against the proscribed social habits have manifested as covert rebellious behaviour---I cannot tell if it is a failure of civic-mindedness or that of the authority's control measures. For all that I know, the truth might be a mix of both, where the individual has been so repressed by the cabal of rules and regulations that instead of learning what is right, they learn how to circumvent and bend all that they disagree with, without ever engaging in the type of spirited debate that would lead everyone one step closer to a consensual truth and reality where everyone contributes to the outcome together.

As such, I throw the blame all around; the authority for failing to enforce the rules that they perceived to be necessary and failing to demonstrate the full power of what being authoritarian means; the rebellious, both covert and overt, for placing their short-term satisfaction over the long-term sustainable solution; and the silent majority, whose only role in this entire crisis is to complain about it online, and allow the selfish among their ranks to carry on their ways for fear of ostracisation from voicing out their concerns firmly and explicitly.

As one might say, we reap what we sow. We've sown apathy, and now we reap it. We've sown the spirit of following the letter of the law and not the spirit of it, and now we reap it.

We are all to blame for everything that happens. It is a lesson that will be learnt through blood, like all lessons that matter. And if we don't learn from it soon enough, more will die, and the lesson repeats itself until we finally learn from its history and not repeat it all again.

Such is the nature of things, pandemic or otherwise. The only difference is that any mistakes and failures are more publicly pronounced in the case of the pandemic than in regular times---think of it as a much harsher rebuke where the stakes are much higher.

I don't have much else to say about all these except one word.

Disappointment.

Not anger, but disappointment.