Part 30
What a difference a week makes!
Suddenly, regardless of how real the threat of COVID-19 is, the actions being taken globally are about to have a profound effect on the long-suffering citizens of planet Earth!
There have been numerous references to World War II as a possible parallel to the way in which people’s lives will be affected by the virus. Perhaps we should rather look at the way we the people, and the governments that make decisions for us, are reacting to the virus as compared with how we all reacted to WWII.
I happen to have been a witness to both these events in Britain. As a child during WWII and now an elder, according to some, approaching my second childhood, I’ve had a look at the two situations and would like to make the following comments:
One of the most powerful memories I have of WWII was the dogged determination of the British people not to give up and not be intimidated by the rumors of an imminent invasion by Hitler’s seemingly unstoppable forces. When the Blitz (bombing raids) started, causing horrendous damage to major cities, we were buoyed up by the incredible bravery of “the Few,” the Battle of Britain pilots who behaved like a very small swarm of bees, inflicting massive casualties on the Luftwaffe.
I clearly remember one day when I opened the front door of our house in Weybridge, Surrey. It was a perfect summer’s day, not a cloud in the sky. Our garden was a mass of blossoms and neat lawns offering a glorious playground and an opportunity to use the bike I had recently learned to ride.
As I stepped out, I became aware of the nearby angry buzzing of aircraft. I looked up to see a Spitfire and Messerschmitt wheeling around each other, seeking an advantage, with frequent short bursts of machinegun fire, as they each in turn held their target momentarily in their gunsights.
I never knew the outcome as they rapidly disappeared over the far horizon, but it engendered a huge burst of excitement in my childish imagination. It also filled me with pride and gratefulness for the unknown pilot who was defending our world.
It wasn’t always as gratifying.
I also remember watching a Wellington Bomber that had been built in the nearby Vickers Armstrong factory, spiralling out of control and crashing on the railway line to London. I later learned that my Aunt’s fiancée had been the test pilot who lost his life in the bomber because of faulty equipment rather than enemy bullets.
On D-Day, my uncle Dennis commanded a tank for the landings and was later to be invalided out after a later battle on French soil. All these incidents simply added to my sense of pride that the British simply refused to be overwhelmed or cowed and that children like myself had a chance of growing up in freedom rather than subservience to a megalomaniac.
By comparison, today’s news offers no inspiration, only paranoid predictions that the virus will destroy life as we know it. When drawing a comparison between the guts and glory of our WWII survival, someone made the point that the enemy during the war was a known factor but the virus has created many unknown and unpredictable scenarios. I can’t agree. The enemy we faced during the war had plenty of variables to it. Would they invade our shores or not? Then there were the buzz bombs and the “V” rockets that were completely unpredictable. When the buzz bomb ran out of fuel, as written in an earlier blog, it either glided or dived straight down, delivering its massive load of explosives to whatever and whomever lay beneath it. The V2 rockets were even more terrifying, in that they travelled at supersonic speed.
My father was walking along a street in London one morning and was passing a six-story office block, when the next thing he remembered he was lying on his back looking up at the sky. He sat up and a shower of glass fragments poured from his moustache, hair, face and clothing. The building right next to him had disappeared. He was enormously fortunate that the blast from a V2 rocket had knocked him down and had travelled over him. Six hundred people in the building were not so lucky.
My point is this. The old expression “There’s nothing to fear except fear itself” applies here. We’ll get through it. We’ll survive as a race … but do we really have to confront the realistic concerns of the situation itself plus what is largely media-generated hysteria? I say no.
I mention a particular fact often, but I’ll say it again: Once ExoBrain is up and running, accurate facts can be predicted and communicated without distortion. It will enable people to assess for themselves the levels of risks involved in any situation.
We should remember how we all confronted Hitler and stared him down. We can do the same with COVID-19 by taking sensible precautions and not succumbing to the hysteria and apathy that the media would have us descend into.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.