Phase 2

Stockholm

“Open the country. Stop having it be closed.”

Bill Wurtz – History of Japan

Today is the day that many of my fellow countrymen have been waiting for. The Italian government has decided to lift some important restrictions that were imposed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Time will tell what kind of effects this decision will have. From my point of view, it won’t matter too much: people who were ignoring the stay-at-home orders were already doing what they wanted in the past weeks. Only now, they’ll be allowed more freedom to travel outside their cities. I hope this won’t bring a new surge in infections two weeks from now.

On my side, I’ve tried to enjoy the quarantine period. It seemed impossible to me one year ago that I could spend this much time at home, so I’ve been looking at the bright side of things ever since this whole mess started.

Granted, I could have taken a little more care of myself, and even though I would never openly admit it (ironic to say this while writing on a public blog), there’s a chance that I might have felt a little down lately. Not sure why, I have everything I need, a lot of the things I want, and many other ones that I would have never had, if this pandemic didn’t break out.

I’ve been worrying more about the upcoming months, and how tough it will be to get a foot in the door of motorsports. Probably the worst time in the last decade to try and get there, with every company in emergency mode due to the lack of revenue and events. Now I know how recent finance graduates felt in 2009. Great timing.

Watching all the idiocy going on these days, like in the US where people protest their governments to “end the quarantine”, doesn’t give me a great deal of hope for the future. We’re slowly seeing the old bastions of democracy fall down into a spiral of corruption and authoritarian government practices.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve lived through a historical “singularity” where democracies have briefly been the most common form of government, and now we’re just going back to normal. Fuelled by brainwashing and relentless propaganda, the “few” are getting more and more ready to stomp on the “many”.

Maybe also for them, now it is a good time to start the Phase 2. We are all ripe fruits, and soon it will be harvesting season.

It’s nice and comforting to think that “everything will be OK”. However, if 2020 gave us a single lesson, t’s that not a single fucking thing will be OK, unless we make it so.