Chernobyl of the 21st Century

I was eating dinner with my family and my mother brought up a quote from the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” that went viral on the Chinese messaging app WeChat as the Chinese authorities mishandled their response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan: “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”

The analogy between the 1986 nuclear accident and the 2020 pandemic — Governments trying to cover up the truth of a disaster and thereby worsening it — may seem a little too similar. I have seen the quote “Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It.” more than a handful of times yet it is still funny how everyone knew what was going to happen, but no one stepped up and stopped it. COVID-19 brought up many unsolved questions lurking deeply in our society and we should be part of the solution.

I made this poster to reflect on some aspects of our society transformed or revealed by COVID-19. It truly disturbs me how much people are ignoring this problem as real-life people are passing away every day because of it. It is plain that we humans are organizing, without prodding from the government. This appears to validate the long-held conservative belief that individual initiative is always superior to policies issued by the government. But the opposite is true: The coronavirus is shattering sacred nostrums about getting and spending only for yourself and your own. It has taken us many long decades — and then a brutally quick quarantine — to remember that we need each other, that compassion is not weakness, that strength in numbers is not about how many people attend a political rally. All this should have been apparent without a pandemic. But so it goes. It has taken one virus to rouse humanity, and we will rise awkwardly, slowly, but steadily.