This past weekend, just hours after I received my salary from my employer, I received an inbox message on my Facebook from a young woman requesting help with basic supplies for her unborn child.
Soon thereafter, I received another from a young woman whose mother is sick and dying of breast cancer. She needed help with groceries at home since there was nothing left for them to eat.
I receive messages like these on a daily basis, and sometimes I am able to help. When I cannot assist, it torments me immeasurably. I try to find ways to mobilise resources so that I can help.
But something has been happening since the lockdown was extended, something that is traumatising me greatly.
Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic gripped the world, people across the world have been dealing with all kinds of challenges - both economic and health related. If you did basic research about the lived experiences of people during this lockdown, you will often read or hear about the loss of revenue, closure of businesses, reduced salaries and people's journeys to recovery after having tested positive for the virus.
We speak openly about the impact of this lockdown on our finances and even our mental health. But one of the things we have not spoken about is the impact on our capacity and willingness to be humane to strangers.
This lockdown is turning us into inward-looking people who are primarily concerned with "our own" rather than with strangers.
Millions of South Africans have lost jobs in the last four months. Many people are barely making ends meet and daily, hundreds of thousands of families know not where the next meal will come from. Some of us, however, are still gainfully employed with our salaries unaffected.
But because some of our closest friends and relatives have been rendered without an income, our financial responsibilities have increased as we try to assist. But we are mainly assisting "our own".
Personally, my primary focus during this incredibly difficult period is my family and my close friends. That's who I'm prioritising. And so, everyday when strangers ask for help, when someone tells me they're hungry or desperate and need even the most minimal assistance which I ordinarily would readily give, my immediate thought is: I am sorry, but I cannot help you because a close friend or relative needs help and they're more important to me than you are.
This is what I hate most about the lockdown. It is slowly eroding our capacity to feel for strangers, something that is inherently human.
Our compassion is being replaced by cold practicality, by the idea that some people are more important. It is making us desensitised to the suffering of others, thus we can watch someone struggle immeasurably and think to ourselves: "You're suffering but you'll live, there are many like you, but right now you're not important to me."
This is what the lockdown has made us become. Covid-19 is not only killing our loved ones and already battered economies, it is killing the very essence of our humanness. And this is just as brutal as the lives we are losing.
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