Do you feel as lucky as I do when you stumble upon toilet paper and hand sanitizer at the store these days/? I do! I feel as if I hit the jackpot. And I don’t even need it to hoard, I just need my weekly supply to take care of my family. When the news about the Coronavirus surfaced, never in my wildest dreams did I think there would be such a high demand for simple household items, which is completely understandable. What a time we are living in these days. It’s hard to think of anything outside of the Coronavirus and the impact it has had on our nation and the world. What’s worse, the media is failing us, a theme we are all too familiar with and yet we continue to fall for it.
Coming from a third-world country where every week we faced a different challenge such as lack of food because we didn’t have money to buy food, and when we did have some to spare, we stood in line at 4 am on a school day, outside the bakery to purchase a bag of bread to sustain our family for a few days. Or the constant threats from Islamic organizations in an attempt to mute our mission work. Better yet, the ongoing fear of United Nations leaving Iraq at a moment’s notice (several times they were very close to leaving), which meant our protector was gone and Saddam Hussein’s military would soon take over and immediately execute thousands, my family included. Or worse, Hussein testing the effectiveness of his chemical and biological weapon on the civilians and watching its impact on the people and the environment. All of these circumstances took place while bombs and missiles continued on and off every few days.
Uncertainty was a constant in my life, so was hunger, diseases, and even death. We never knew where our next meal was coming from but it always did. Looking around me today, I find the pandemic interesting. Interesting in the sense of everyone’s reaction. In no way am I minimizing the seriousness of the situation, but in the sense of the fear that has overpowered many. We have been crippled by fear mostly through the effects of social media, so we react by hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizers instead of rationally and logically processing the situation and taking advice from CDC and WHO. We have not been defeated so why are we limping out?
Today, we have a choice to make, we can look at this situation as a tragedy and continue hoarding items that will not keep us healthy or safe from COVID-19, or we can look at this as an opportunity. An opportunity to focus on family time, an opportunity to rise to the occasion, to help our elderly neighbor or babysit someone’s children because schools are closed. An opportunity to protect your family by any means possible but at the same time to stand up in the face of fear and know that you will not be overwhelmed by it. During these dark days make your own luck by counting your blessings and keep preparing for brighter days.
