SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

(This article originally published in Turkish on March 17, 2020)

Now!

Everybody pull out a blank sheet of paper and place it in front of you…

Grab a pen …

And with huge letters, write at the top:

“This is not a crisis, this is CHAOS.”

Below that, jot this down:

“Nothing will ever be the same again”…

Now, lean back. Ponder.

What’s the difference between crisis and chaos?

Let’s think along these lines:

“Crisis can, while chaos cannot be managed”…

You’ve probably heard about this thing called crisis management. We, on the other hand, have come up with “crisis communication management”—a completely different discipline. We even said: “99% of crisis management is crisis communication management.”

As one of many examples, we lived through another global financial crisis in 2008, the cracks of which first appeared in Wall Street. The damage done has not yet begun to heal, either. We’ve certainly not been able to reclaim the good old days. That said, we bit our tongues and survived, even if everything went “all lopsided”.

People have lost their homes and jobs.
They’ve lost their property…
God knows how many suicides have been committed.
Amongst us are those who caused all this. Alas, “life goes on” for them as through nothing had ever happened in the first place.

Crises are manageable phenomena. We can handle them though timely diagnosis, accurate treatment, and—above all—reliability.

We can plan.

Assessing loss, accessing accurate information, processing information, recovering, making radical decisions…

Effective leadership. Openness, transparency… “Apologising” if need be…

Gradually, everything clicking into place between the hot and the cool down periods of the crisis…

When we use communication tools properly to integrate such positive steps forward, we can deal with any crisis.

They leave residue behind. A bitter taste is left behind on the palate. However, even if we are forced to abandon our most basic of routines, we replace them with new ones and after a while, “life picks up where it left off and keeps on going”.

Chaos is not like that.

Because no one can control it.
So, we can only manage moments.
What has happened and why is never clear.
You can’t access accurate information anyway.
We are facing a process where we have to “respect” what we are given as well as whatever is placed down on the table.

Literally everything can reverse within three to five hours. We might encounter different information. Keep calm, don’t be cross. It’s chaos!

We have to do with whatever it is we have at present.

And then?

When the dust settles…

Life won’t pick up from where it left off. It can’t!

This might seem a somewhat random example but we used to be able board the subway rather care free, back when terrorism wasn’t on our minds… Look at the point that we’ve arrived at now that terrorism is understood to be a security problem for everyone. Especially after 9/11, we’ve witnessed the world gradually sweeping democratic values and human rights under the carpet and gradually transitioning towards becoming a police state.

Life surrenders to chaos!

Everything amid chaos is different.

First, a dust cloud swarms out of nowhere to the point that it becomes impossible for you to see anything beyond nose length.
Everything comes to a grinding halt.
Life surrenders to chaos until the dust settles.
Chaos has its own will.
It knows when to stop.
It decides how wide it wants to be.
It decides for itself who to kill, and who to let live.
Who you are—a prime minister, a head of state, Joe Average on the subway—doesn’t matter. Everything is but a grain in that dust cloud.
Chaos expects full “surrender”.

Like the almighty god Zeus, chaos likes it when its ego gets petted.
At the altar of its temple;
It looks out from the corner of its eye at what measures we’ve taken, what prohibitions we’ve imposed. Perhaps it even laughs in its sleeves!

Chaos’s backbone is the unknown and uncertainty.

Examples of pandemics from the pages of history include the bubonic plague, cholera, the Spanish flu, and the Ebola virus, just to name a few… Life has never just picked up from where it’s left off wherever such catastrophes have made their presence known. They haven’t yet “destroyed” themselves either. Like a sneaky enemy on the ambush waiting to lunge on the next opportunity! (Scientists claim that the origin of corona virus is history’s so-called other corona viruses.)

Corona—amid the uncertainty of the dust cloud trailing its path—is “not a crisis”, but it’s chaos—or, as I like to call it, “coronachaos”!

It has made 7.5 billion people in the world “refugees”.
It has turned boundaries inside out.
It has made us abandon all our everyday routines.
It makes no discrimination between religion, language, race or gender. Mosques and churches have had to close their doors, exclaiming ‘God approves of your worshiping from home’. No one’s objected.
Even the silence at family dinner tables reeks of anxiety. Many have even considered touching for love and friendship too much, and have prohibited it. They have to. Children have distanced themselves from their fathers, measuring themselves by the ruler.
The word positive has sold itself to a pawnshop.

Is this a test?

Is humanity going through a test?
Rationality against emotions,
Willpower against weak spots,
Hope against surrender,
Measure against panic,
Credibility against self-quest?

This is nothing like dealing with the mask and cologne issue.
The efforts made by the rich to fend off the pandemic in their private shelters means nothing…
The hungry and the pampered stand both at equal distance to the virus.
The northern and southern hemispheres, and the east and west alike face the reality that they’re one another’s neighbours and next of kin…

Science shall somehow overcome this pandemic—that, there is no doubt. Alas, what shall replace the chaos created by the pandemic is the issue that science cannot overcome.

Coronachaos is a lesson to all of humanity. It has taught us to pause until the next version of the virus rears its ugly head. It is a fact of life that whets the appetite of sci-fi scenarios… It lacks a hero, and it forces us to learn about the price of the unknown with a new lesson after a new cloud of dust that might appear at any moment.

Humanity will undoubtedly design a future out of desperation with what they learn and find as remedy.
Written at the bottom line of this design will be the words:
Protecting only ourselves means nothing.
We must pull ourselves together.
It will be a pity for American people because Trump wanted to buy vaccines from a German pharmaceutical company to protect only American people, in exchange for however much money they wanted.
So-called developed countries are not so developed, it seems. We shall learn to define “real” development as the “virtues of being human”, as members of a global family fighting against the pandemic.

 Now, Flip over your paper

Now…

Recalling that we pulled out a blank sheet of paper and placed it in front of ourselves…

It is time to flip it over…

Write the following down…
1.5 billion people on this planet have no access to potable water!
More than 2.5 billion people lack basic sanitation.
Every minute, a child under 5 years of age dies from malnutrition, and a lack of access to medicine.
Every night, close to one billion people go to bed–if they have one–hungry, and wake up hungry.
More than 200 million people have become refugees, been separated from their mother and fatherlands, cultures, and families… and forced to live in other countries at the hands of “so-called developed” countries plundering their homes in order to feed themselves, and to raise their quality of life – whatever that means…
Machine guns have been slipped into the hands of more than 280,000 children between the ages of 12 and 14, who then have been sent to unknown battles in order to kill one other…

We have arrived at the current moment because we blindly thought that we resolved these facts by covering them with “crisis blankets”; we’ve stared chaos in the face. Chaos is a dust cloud. It lifts itself into the air, messes everything up, and leaves no trace of the old world behind as soon as it dissipates.

Where are we standing now?
What solutions are our minds, efforts, and competencies offering to those who have lost their future, and their hopes and dreams?
Write:
We, after all, are but mere guests in this planet. Guests mustn’t forget that they are just that—guests…