If you had teenage children who needed discipline, how would you go about it? They are already big and strong, but as senseless as only teenagers can be.
Here is an allegory: One day, you have to go for the whole day and leave your two teenage kids in charge of the house and of their younger brother and sister. When you come home late at night, you find that they have wrecked the place. They broke the antique book cabinet in order to use the wood for a bonfire with their friends. They built a minicar by taking apart the laundry machine to use its engine and wires, breaking the kitchen table to make a frame for the car, hinging wheels from your lawnmower, transmission and steering wheel from their little brother’s electric toy car, and for a driver seat they used their little sister’s desk chair so now she can’t do her homework.
When you open the door, the little ones are crying their eyes out, and the older ones are driving around the living room in their minicar bumping into anything that still stands and laughing senselessly at their own mayhem and at their brother’s and sister’s screams.
Our allegory could have been a bad joke if it weren’t true. The parent is Mother Nature, and we, humanity are the unruly teenagers. The little brother and sister are, of course, the plants and animals, and the house is our common home, Earth.
But Nature found a way to discipline us: the novel coronavirus. Through it, she sent us to our separate rooms, so we would stop breaking our house down and harassing the rest of the species. In her wisdom, she has found a way to discipline us without hurting us too much. Her admonition is very mild compared to the damage we’ve done because she’s merciful; she doesn’t want to harm us, so she chose the least painful way.
But we senseless teenagers will not listen. We insist on reopening the economies, returning to breaking down the house, pestering the little siblings, breaking down the house and using what is in it, and ignoring Mother’s warnings.
It won’t work; she’s stronger than us, smarter than us, and holds all the cards in her hands. If we leave her no choice, she will send us to our rooms without supper. If we remain obstinate, she will deny us any food or water, communication with our friends, and whatever else she deems necessary to discipline us.
If we learn the lesson now and start treating one another and all of nature with consideration, she will be as kind as only Mother Nature can. We will have abundance! If we refuse, we’ll still learn the lesson but later, after much more pain.