SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

 

And what a dream at that!

We are living in a world where water, energy, and our ancestral seeds are “free”. Yet, we “presently” don’t focus on who would manage them, how we would invest in and make all three accessible to the public. However, water, energy in all of its forms (trains, buses, planes, and cars are already powered using either electricity or solar energy) and—above all—seeds, plants, and tree saplings (the core of healthy eating) are free!

Let’s imagine that health care and medicine were free! A dream, you say?

Next, we see the entire world morph into a “Wikipedia” society, so to speak. That is, communal lifestyle where everyone feeds production for free, and where products are shared for free!

And money? What about that?

We’ve solved that: the end of currency! In a virtual world, only one type of currency is used. The population dictates its value. The lower the population a country has, the more valuable that country’s money is.

We Wake Sweating Buckets…

What a “bizarre dream”, we say to ourselves as we wake up in sweat! We get dressed to go to work… Mask our faces, slip our hands in our gloves, and put our glasses on. Oh, and don’t forget the hand-sanitizer and cologne for the old back pocket…

We queue on two-metre spaces in front of the sliding doors in order to get onto the subway. Only a limited number of passengers at a time can board each train. If too many people board at once, the next thing you know, you hear the blow of a whistle.

We’ve arrived at the plaza. Security guards take our temperature with thermal camera guns. The queue for the lift is the same as it is on the subway. The only difference is that only three persons can board at a crack, meaning that the queue is never ending. Hence why everyone’s working hours have changed. Now everything is divided over 24 hours. Some arrive at 10:00 at night, others at 5:00 in the morning. The lifts that we already normally wait 40 minutes in order to break for lunch become every employee’s worst nightmare. Of course, this “only half of you can go to work” format exists to encourage people to work from home.

Our workplaces have now embraced the whole “open office” concept– and I mean open! Twenty people now back into the same space that used to easily fit forty or fifty. The gap between our desks is wide enough for an elephant to comfortably drift about. Out with meetings, in with web conferences. Even when we happen to all be on the same floor! You’re forbidden to work without a mask or gloves. You can’t even find a single coffee vending machine without masks and hand sanitizer sitting right next it.

Smoke breaks seem to be the first thing everyone has given enough due to how much of a pain it is to whisk in and out of the building.

The city’s tinge as changed somehow. Everything’s hazy, crumpled, moist. Not!… The sky is clear, and dare I say it—sunny!

That said, people now live in their own thought bubbles.

Worried…
Anxious…
Withdrawn…
Distant…
“Hellos” reek of insincerity.

There are couples on the streets. They are trying to find each other’s warmth through their plastic gloves. How do they kiss through masks? How do they make love? Is it even possible to enter a relationship without a certified clean bill of health?

The familiar cafés and restaurants of our past… are now not so familiar. Every table is arranged in line with social distancing. I wonder how many people can actually sit around the given table.

What’s to become of movie theatres, normal theatres, and concerts? Oh and soccer matches? Many a question has been left unanswered.

I’m humming.

And leaning backwards ever so slightly…

Is this too a dream, or?

Were the World Rid of the Three Evils!

An article in the Guardian reads: “Let’s shut off the valves of the fossil fuel industry while we have the chance.” Every last one of us knows too well that for the world hasn’t seen the light of day in over 150 years at the hands of petrol, water, and now seeds. All three have turned into “amusement parks” in their own right to business ventures. Our planet’s resources are caught in a web with three spiders: energy, defence, and finance—who start wars at whim, turn stock market upside down, and play with the nuclear armament card!

They dictate politics, trade, religion, production, consumption, and technology.

An imposed “man-free order” has become the new normal.

This new normal has thrown the whole world into a “quarantine” with seemingly no end in sight.

Close to eight billion people have suddenly become “refugees” overnight. They’ve come face-to-face with the ghetto. The Maserati at the door has suddenly has become a backyard fixture.

The rich and the poor are now equal.
A state of emergency is the new normal.

Borders have been closed.
To say that life has been re-formatted wouldn’t be an exaggeration.

We can say that The Corona Virus—which has made its way into the identity of millions as “carriers”—is cause of all this. That said, were it not virus, climate change and global warming were already waiting impatiently at the side-lines as reserve players. Likewise, Ebola was one of the top eleven players on playground. Disease otherwise attributed to birds, goats, pigs, and cows have been yo-yoing back and fourth between nature and humankind in recent years.

Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before, Don’t They?

During 1960s, we washed our farms with DDT sprayed from planes, only then to proudly line our dinner tables with their produce. At the same time, America dumped peppered Cuban farmland with toxic chemicals to drive Cuba’s economy into the ground. The government encouraged ours (Turkey’s)!

In the wake of Chernobyl in the 1980s, Europeans found themselves shopping for their fruits and veggies with radiation metres in hand. Our own Minister of Industry & Trade sipped on his radiation tea as thousands of people in the Black Sea region withered away from cancer.

In 2011, when the Fukushima nuclear power plant succumbed to an approaching tsunami, the tricking radiation didn’t say “other countries need not worry, I’ll only harm Japan.” As if the entire Pacific coast of the U.S. hadn’t received its fair share… Radiation suddenly took over the world economy. The shudders nearly closed for good on all sectors linked to Japan, in terms products, raw materials, and spare parts!

Locals who managed to survive the disaster were transported elsewhere. All agricultural products throughout the region were destroyed. Entry into the area was banned for months on end. Every aspect of the Japanese economy had shattered—and it has still yet to recover. TEPCO executives who had run the plant were convicted of hiding the radiation leak from the public to prevent the company’s stocks from plummeting.

Critical Milestones

The past century has not been without milestones that have helped shape the next phase of human history. August 6, 1945 being one example of this—the day atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and transformed human societies in “other people from another world”.

On July 20, 1969, humanity set foot on the moon and opened the doors of another world. On January 16, 1984, Macintosh was launched. Now everyone would easily access, process, and share information anywhere in the world from their own computers. This paved the way for the information age and the launch of “www,” the Internet on August 20, 1990. Immediately prior, the Soviet Union collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, bringing an end of the Cold War… In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit introduced the concept of “Sustainable Human Development”.

All of the above milestones have re-designed how humanity lives from the very core.

Let’s not forget the Enron and Wall Street global financial crises of 2001 and 2008 among these milestones.

Alas, not one of these dates cut as wide and as deep as the Corona Virus of 2020.

Humanity has surrendered to utter chaos. There doesn’t appear to be any end in sight either. Even if we do manage to put this crisis behind us, facing humanity is the harsh reality that the cultural aftershocks to come will never allow it to return back to its factory settings.

We “Do” Miss Freedom!

The freedom to do whatever we want whenever we want, to go wherever we want, to forget mind is currently sitting in some pawn shop. Life will certainly evolve down a “different” direction after Covid-19, whose economic and social aftermath has yet to be seen.

Is this an opportunity? Alternatively, is there a “new reason” out there that might enable the backbone of social life return be restored to some sense of normalcy? Or, might someone slip into our hands free tickets to nuclear, water, and food crises, or perhaps other epidemics by “abdication of reason”?

To quote an old article of mine, “Building a New World from Gobeklitepe to Palo Alto:”

“We can tell where the scenario that we call life is heading by looking at the past few millennia (a rather short time frame considering how old humanity is). Anatolia, for instance, has played a leading role in humanity’s evolution for almost twelve thousand years. As the secrets of the twelve-thousand-year enigma that is Gobeklitepe slowly begins to unfold, we see that the essence of the culture in Gobeklitepe was not very different from contemporary culture as we are quick to assume. In fact, if we were to set on a journey to Palo Alto from Gobeklitepe, and were that journey to take twelve thousand years, we would see along that journey that certain fundamental cultural traits aren’t all that exotic.”

So, what gives?
We’re trapped in our homes.
The borders have been closed.
We can’t even go travel between cities.
We fall asleep every night worrying when our turn will come.

We’ve traded the values that we once fed our souls with for the all mighty American dollar:
Solidarity, helping others with no expectations, authenticity, sincerity, loyalty, offering role models with hope, being fair/just and ethical, compassion, generosity, abstinency, unconditional respect, transparency (being true to yourself), accountability.

What They Call the New World Order

The symbols of a new, post-WWII international order, the institutions created in the hope of bringing peace, welfare and justice to the World’s nations (e.g. the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank) have clearly proven just how dysfunctional they are given that we know “who they really are, and who they really serve”. Now, it’s clear that we need brand new international institutions to design not only today, but the next thousand years. They need to be created in such a way that allows no one country to dominate over any other in management and inspection. They and their basic infrastructure of “water, energy, seeds, health, medicine, education, and justice”—thus ensuring a decent life for all—managed by inclusive international institutions designed with the same logic may only ever appear in sci-fi films. That said, wasn’t the Covid-19 pandemic a sci-fi movie once anyways?

Isn’t This Planet Our Responsibility?

The fiftieth anniversary of World Day is now behind us. We haven’t lend our ears to science, to reverse our environmental problems—hence our poor quality of life. We’ve literally lost 50 years! We have turned a blind eye to that this planet—and its flowers, insects, birds, and trees—is our responsibility. We have failed to fulfil our custodian mission for our virtual riches. Humanity has paid and continues to pay a heavy price for this world, where even the rich can’t enjoy their wealth. I can’t help but think whether or not we might one day open the door ever so slightly to future where humanity will be able enjoy the virtues of being human, and where energy, water, and seeds are free for all.