When you talk about Covid19, maybe your colleagues are feeling personally blamed
Everybody thinks they are judged by the person who they are talking to. I know why the local people look slightly shy and scared when they talk to me. I’m a Japanese man living in Romania for over 7 years. I’ve spent a quarter of my life outside Japan and it’s becoming longer and longer. When they talk to me, they think I’m evaluating them as Romanian, as an eastern European. As a matter of fact, I also think I am judged by the Romanian person. After all, we are only looking at ourselves.
9 years ago, multiple nuclear reactors exploded in Japan. All I heard from the government and the news was everything was under control. However it’s not contained yet. That moment, I decided to leave the country. Since then, research has been my main work. I was liked for this reason and I was hated for this reason. I can’t forget when BBC invited me to speak on their radio show but they never gave me a chance to say a word until the end of the show. Knowing matters.
2020 is the year of Covid19, but I have been following it since the patient number was still one digit. I was thinking it was probably due to the air pollution in Wuhan but something in my head was ringing. It was December 2019. My friend in the intelligence unit of the UK was telling me they are using alcohol to drink but not to sanitize the hands in early 2020. What I’m different from most other people about is that I’m nowhere but I’m everywhere. I can hear the news from Asia like it’s local news but I can also hear the news from Europe and the US. I was reading the Chinese news about the first clinical attempt and its analysis of chloroquine on Covid19 patients in Shanghai clinic and HIV medicine abolished by the Thailand government before they became the large discussion in the western world. As I researched Covid19 situation more and more, I noticed something. There are people who don’t want to know about what is going on regardless of their social position or professions. From my observation, at least 30% of people fall in this category apart from 5% who are floating between the both sides.
I saw the similar situation after 311, but this time the scale is incomparable. Besides, some of them are convincing themselves that they already know everything. I dare not to use the term conspiracy theory. However in general, they have a certain concept in common. Something like supergovernment exists somewhere, and they are adjusting the buttons and levers for some secret purpose. Sometimes it’s about the power, sometimes it’s about money, sometimes it’s about birth. It pretty much depends on the person who embraces the narrative. For people spreading everywhere like me, those narratives are very questionable because the Covid19 situation is almost equally bad in every country. The value of money is dropping. Obviously powers are waning in this crisis, which is overwhelming the capacity of any governments or a particular person.
One unique phenomenon that interested me after 311 was a lot of people, almost everyone in the sight thought that earthquake was a punishment by something. Japanese is not really religious. We don’t have apocalyptic concepts. However almost everyone had the thought that it was because of their wrongdoing, at least for a moment. Logically speaking, this is nonsense, but this might be a common psychological reaction when something uncontrollable overwhelms us. If so, the aggressive negligence about Covid19 situation might be the next step. Those people might be thinking they are blamed when they hear about Covid19 situation. What they are trying to blame might be the oppressed reflection of themselves. The selves who are obsessed with power, wealth, aggression, etc.. They look like they are blaming something super, but they might be actually blaming themselves.
There is nothing to take personally here. I want to say it is not their fault. I don’t want them to think they are blamed when someone talks about Covid19. Surely some governments should have invested more into public health and accelerated tests in the early stage of the pandemic, however, there is no particular individual who caused Covid19. In the times of anger, maybe what we should do first is to forgive yourself. This is not a judgement. Nobody is judged by anyone.
