How the coronavirus proves that we are all the same

Racism has never been something that was easy for me to understand. Prejudices fall into the same category. However, I will not sit here and say that I have never judged someone by their outer appearance or their way of speaking, their job title, their status, their bank account. There are so many ways we judge people by.

This judgement creates seperation. We seperate people from ourselves or the groups we choose to belong to because they seem different from us. We create groups that we belong to and groups we don‘t belong to. There are psychological benefits to this because otherwise we wouldn‘t do this.

By choosing groups we get a sense of predictability and thus a sense of control. Let me stress the word sense here. We don‘t have control and we never ever have control. I think we all feel this right now more than probably ever in our lives before. However, we seek the sense of control in whatever way we can to feel some sort of security and safety. Dividing people into different race groups and choosing which one you belong to creates a sense of safety for some people. It is not to say that this is a good way to create safety, it can only be a simple attempt of explaining why people judge each other.

Of course there is another reason for the judgement of others: It is to make yourself feel better about yourself. Unfortunately some people choose the coping mechanism of putting someone else down to feel better about themselves and better about not having the achievement they saw in the other person.

Right now during this global pandemic more than ever I cannot understand this coping mechanism. I am very grateful that this coping mechanism of putting someone else down to feel better is never something I want to choose and that I am aware enough to see when this happens, for others and for me and even when I don‘t want it to happen. I am also grateful that I do not choose to create a sense of safety by dividing people into groups that are seperate from me but that I feel more safe the more I see connection, the more I see unity, the more I see how we are all the same.

All of us in this world right now we feel the same things. No matter where we are from, no matter what we look like, no matter what we do. We are all in this together if we want to or not. We all wish for our loved ones to be safe. We all wish for health now more than ever. We all want to protect people we love from getting sick. I see unity in this. It doesn‘t matter where we live, we all wish for the same things because at the end of the day there is only a handful things we all need and all care about. One country beating this fucking virus is all of us beating this virus. One country getting more supplies is all of us getting more supplies. And I can hear the people arguing against it and I feel your pain, too. Because that is another thing we all have in common right now, pain. All sorts of pain are present right now and we can all feel it if we want to or not. Because we are all humans and maybe unfortunately but also fortunately we feel. We feel everything, the good and the bad. Hearing the numbers of infections rise in one country is pain for all other countries as well. But so is there hope and joy in seeing the numbers of the one‘s that recover rise in other countries as well all over the world. We need each other during these times more than we realize in our everyday lives. Hearing that Chinese people are getting closer to beating the virus and its consequences feels so so personal. It makes me tear up. Every person winning this fight is all of us winning this fight. And equally is the loss during this time a loss for all of us and I feel for everyone that lost someone to this. I am sorry on a level I cannot put in words and all my thoughts are with you, my heart is right there with you and I want to hug every single person that was affected by this. We are all one. We always have been. But it feels truer than ever.

My hope is that it will be present even after this. Because normally we can close off to the pain in the world because it seems to hard to bare. Why? Because we are all one and we have always been. Right now we have to feel it for all of us and that is a lot. But we will get through this. Together. Now more than ever.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Wash your hands. We will get through this. Love y'all.