Reflection of Today - By Marisa Syed

This year feels like we are stuck in a Marvel movie, except the hero is yet to be seen. As a society, we are trying to stay calm as we watch the world slowly crumble in front of us. Beautiful cities that were once filled with tourists now look like ghost towns. The city that never sleeps, Manhattan, is now in some sort of coma. Mother Nature is being tortured to the extent that we don’t know if she will ever forgive us. While all this is happening, we continue to marginalize and penalize sectors of society if they do not fall into a specific corridor based on race, creed, sex, and even socioeconomic class.

By the end of February 2020, COVID-19 had come into our lives unheralded. Since then, it has affected almost every single person in some way. It has shut down countries, ruined economies, invoked mistrust among neighbors, and inadvertently capsized our lives. Reality has shifted into another realm and we are trying to accommodate to the best of our abilities because that is what we do as humans -- we evolve to survive. However, the lack of direction by our leadership during that time has further spiraled us into emotional turmoil.

Over these past few months, I learned that there are different forms of pain. The physical pain of the disease, the pain of not being able to see, hold or even bury loved ones, and the pain of helplessness because the people who were supposed to guide us are entangled in a battle of proving themselves better than others. We have been scared and the only thing we have to defend ourselves is a mask. Then people started to die, hospitals were full, and the morgues were at capacity. The COVID-19 counter was on everyone’s phone, tracking infections and deaths, and all we could do was watch. Yet they murmur that not many are dying -- my question is, why are they still dying?

Every time I check the news, there is always some disaster due to climate change. If action isn’t taken now to adopt greener ways in our industries, natural disasters are imminent. It’s time for the governments to start thinking about the future of younger generations. When I think of my future, I ask myself, “Will there be clean air for me to breathe or clean water to drink?”

Capitalistic attitudes must be changed in the growing economies as it has had a negative influence on climate change. Exploitation exists under capitalism for monetary gain; there is illegal use of workers and the exploitation of earth’s natural resources. For example, once slavery ended in America, sweatshops worldwide replaced slavery. The driver of success should be the sustainability of the earth, our health, a secure future, and not profiteering. This can only be achieved by the worldwide collaboration of all governments.

To add to that year, prejudice is at its pinnacle. We are born without prejudice but we learn and develop it through skewed social interactions. Murder after murder, people had enough and started to protest. The leadership chose to look the other way, leading to public resentment.

Those very protests soon turned into riots as a cry for help. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the voice of the unheard.” Riots aren’t always a justifiable means for action but how many more hashtags need to go viral for the system to understand that no one should be suffering from brutality just because of their skin color? Why are people scared of the very people who have sworn to protect us? We live in the greatest country on earth, as it was written in the Declaration of Independence, “by the people, for the people.” The question is, who are these people, and do they have a specific color, creed, or gender in 2020?

Will we have a Marvel hero come to save us or are we at the “shores of Plutonium” at the threshold of our demise as a race?

- Words by Marisa Syed

Cover page by Brianna Paulino