Humans or Beasts

By Edin Urjan Kukavica

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Did we really need a virus that transmits from animal to human, which animals live with and which kills humans, to realize that humans have hit rock bottom of devolution and have perhaps irreversibly turned from humans into beasts? As humanity, we have had few indicators that we have long neglected and renounced all characteristics of a civilized human community; first, we killed each other for millennia fighting over God, claiming that God is exclusively on the side of the victors, and then, after dividing ourselves into nations, peoples, tribes, packs, and herds, we began to slaughter and kill each other bestially, establishing only one law: the law of the strongest, no longer caring whose side God is on, but rather attributing divine rights and prerogatives to the strongest.

Are we, in this microcosm known as Bosnia and Herzegovina, learning anything from what is happening to us, or are we merely trying to save our constituent heads? Global changes are no longer distant prospects; they are knocking on our doors; those whose help we unreasonably hoped for have duly closed their borders, halted exports, and turned their backs on us, saving their neo-colonial heads from a plague which, if they did not cause it themselves, they certainly helped to spread uncontrollably through negligence, and which is now knocking on their doors too. Do the shelves of our stores and shopping malls full of products from manufacturers we've never heard of – and soon, I am sure, pharmacies full of medicines of dubious origin and even more dubious composition – not herald changes only in the addresses of power centers, while the relationships remain exactly the same?

Are all these things not calling us to learn? And how does one actually learn? By trying, by making mistakes, by correcting oneself, or by observing others as they try, make mistakes, correct themselves, and progress!? Does anyone truly learn from others' mistakes, or only and exclusively from their own? If history repeats itself for those who do not remember, forget, and try again... has anyone ever truly learned anything?

The coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS CoV-2, whatever its name, will come and go, just as the previous six animal viruses have passed, with which we humans were warned that we were sliding into inhumanity. But do all these things, which hint at it in fragments, not call on us to realize that the path we have collectively, and especially individually, taken so far is not good and not right, and that it is high time to turn from worrying about all that we cannot influence and which is not so important, to what we can influence and what is most important to us: ourselves! And not just or no longer in terms of clothes and shoes, cars and money... but in terms of physical culture as an indicator, culture of living as a whole as a discipline, and spiritual culture as a result. Why should anything, even a virus, prevent us from starting to build a decent society from ourselves?

There are more reasons for such a decision than a single column can contain, from theological, eschatological, through sociological and political, to selfishly human ones. Before and after all of them is the one that God – and many of us here claim to believe in God – will not change the condition of a people until that people changes its attitude towards itself and, ultimately, towards God. In it, in that "reason," lies and is revealed the commitment of a human being whether they will become a human or remain an animal.

For now, let the fact that the only effective strategy for fighting this virus is one in which "80% of the population should be allowed to get sick so that the community develops herd immunity," which is called the "herd strategy" among experts, be a final clear indicator for us? I doubt it. Be that as it may, if the pandemic sends any message from which a lesson should be learned, then it is without any doubt: Either you will live as humans, or you will die as beasts!