Can any of you remember Sim City?
It was a PC game where you spent hours in building up a city – ensuring that you had the best road infrastructure, rail network, schooling, housing, relationships, industry, factories, airports, and emergency services. These were then mapped and controlled by the ‘spend budget’ that you created. Things went really well until a ‘disaster’ happened – be that a typhoon, a flood, a dinosaur attack or an invasion of extraterrestrials. It didn’t matter how you ran the ‘budget’ you knew it was going to hurt and the imaginary newspapers told you that! Seemed like a harmless excursion.
Fast forward 20 or so years and we have COVID. It doesn’t matter what political colour you are, it doesn’t matter what infrastructure you have built – COVID hurts. Be it a loss of a loved one, a loss of a business or job, the collapse of a local economy, the anxiety that social distancing and isolation brings, the uncertainty about what 2021 holds for us or other as yet unknown – the message is clear.
We need to pull together as a community.
We need to do our ‘bit’ and we need to start to rebuild.
- Cherish the ones we love,
- Celebrate the small steps of achievement,
- Encourage and support those in strife,
- Let the pessimism (the wobble) co-exist with optimism.
- Keep celebrating the small steps and party (metaphorically) on the big achievements.
Life will be tough, life will be different – but we need to pull together – period.