It has never been so clear as it is today that interconnectivity has turned the whole world into a small neighbourhood. No one is unknown; no one is too far from anyone else. There is no way we can ignore anyone on the ground on the account that we are not aware of their conditions or problems. If we are not doing anything it is because of our disinterest. Our disinterest comes from our wrong belief that if I can be successful in accumulating wealth, that will benefit everybody. It is time to wake up to point out that this belief is not founded on reality and it is against all the norms of human happiness. Our happiness, material and psychological, lies in sharing with each other, not taking away from each other.
In this catastrophic situation our responsibility is to take care of those who are in need and cannot protect themselves. This is the time for our Super Happiness community to come up with actions to give worldwide guidance for solidarity, gleaning from all our past experience. We have to show the way to handle the consequences of the massive damage through our endless mismanagement, our misconstrued economic models, and our indifference to healthcare.
We plan our coming days in the following way: we shall continue to work this summer under the banner of “The Summer of Purpose.”
We shall keep listening to the WHO and the UN, to receive their guidance to go through our daily realities. By the end of June, around the old Super HappYYness Festival dates that we have just abandoned, we, together with your inputs, will assess the global situation whether the time is right for launching our campaign to build a “New Civilization.” In any case, we will come back to you with our collective thoughts and ideas. For this purpose, we invite you to keep old dates - June 26-29, 2020 - still blocked, in case we can come up with ideas to get together virtually to review the situation in each country at that point of time and the role we must play within our communities and also globally.
The COVID-19 pandemic has already impacted the whole world. We have still to see, by the time it ends, how much of our weaknesses this pandemic will reveal in our health system, global decision-making system, our coping mechanism, global financial system, and in many more aspects of our lives which we have taken for granted for ages. By the end of June we will see a lot more than what we see now. Before we begin to see any wrongly designed massive recovery programmes — unacceptably tilted to the rich, on the back of the heavily condemned institutional structures and protocols - we have to take the opportunity to define our concepts, elaborate our programmes, and policies.
We must promise to ourselves that the Corona crisis should not end up just a distant unpleasant memory in the near future. We should get ready to mark 2020 as the year of tectonic shift in our thinking and our action. The memory of 2020 should provide us the moral fuel and will to redefine ourselves drastically. I think this pandemic strengthens the will to fight together.
We must make 2020 as the new birth year for the human race. We shall treat as treasure the memories of everything which led to 2020. Think about it while we are spending endless days and nights at a stretch hopefully imagining what the future holds for this planet and all forms of lives it holds.
In the meantime, stay healthy, keep everybody else healthy, look after the elderly and the families around you who are struggling to find the food to survive. Keep in touch locally and globally. Assure each other that we are not alone.
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Professor Muhammad Yunus
The Nobel Laureate
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