Due to the Havoc Currently Being Wreaked among All of Us by COVID-19, Our Prime Duty/Responsibility Is Now More Than Ever To Champion Humanity, FGGH.

The verb “to champion” something means “to defend” and/or “to strongly advocate for” something. Indeed, according to both Merriam-Webster online dictionary and Vocabulary.com, to “champion” something means to “protect or fight for [something] as a champion” [does]. Vocabulary.com further adds that one of the synonyms of [to] “champion” is [to] “defend”, whereas Merriam-Webster online dictionary particularly specifies that “champion suggests publicly defending one unjustly attacked or too weak to advocate his or her own cause”. Also for Collins online dictionary, “if you?champion a person, a cause, or a principle, you support or defend them”.

So why in light of the havoc currently being wreaked by the Coronavirus is it now more than ever necessary to champion humanity? Or, in other words, what actually happened with us human beings that led us to the predicament and doom in which we currently find ourselves and that threatens us with extermination if we do not shake up, pull ourselves together and get back our wise and sound thinking in place?

What happened with us is actually threefold as follows:

a)?????We lost our compass North due to our abandoning of God and all the God-deriving three attributes, namely: (1) moral values such as truth, justice, integrity, honesty, etc.; (2) emotions of humaneness such as love, empathy, sympathy, pity, compassion; and (3) dispositions and attitudes such as trust (in terms of both trustworthiness and trustfulness), personal responsibility, carefulness, nonviolence and nonkilling, peacefulness, and harmony. So, we went upside down and, in guise of guides for our behaviors, conduct and social relationships, we adopted the opposites of what we should have adopted in terms of moral values, emotions, as well as dispositions and attitudes.

b)????We forgot the great reality once famously expressed by India’s great moral leader Mohandas Gandhi that the Earth has got enough resources to meet everyone’s needs, but not enough for everyone’s greed (Sachs: 2011). So, we grew a morbid fear of not having our needs met and, the excessive greed we thus developed led us to engaging our teeth and nails in the merciless fight we have been waging against our fellow human beings without fearing to destroy our common environmental habitat, all this in what former UNESCO Director-General Federico Mayor called the “one threat looming nearer, that of ‘everyone for themselves’” (UNESCO: 1995, p.3).

c)?????We forgot that our Humanity is Common and Shared amongst all of us, as well as characterized for each and every one of us by Dignity, Autonomy, and Vulnerability, to such extent that we rather needed to first Champion Humanity, and then preciously keep it unharmed in all its dimensions.

And it is the above-portrayed three lacking things that actually led us to have begun doing the most unthinkable foolishness of all times consisting of what in a Rwandan culture’s linguistic wit is called gutema ishami wicayeho, meaning literally “one to cut a tree’s branch on which one is seated” (metaphor also graphically illustrated here), which has led to the extreme doom we are all facing to the risk of having all our lives wiped out from the face of the Earth if we do not shake up, pull ourselves together and get back our wise and sound thinking in place.

References

Sachs, J. D. (2011) The Earth provides enough to meet everyone’s needs. Article published March 2, 2011 in The National, available here.

UNESCO (1995) Address by Mr Federico Mayor Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at the opening of Audience Africa. Speech delivered 6 February 1995, available here.