Mark Wignall | One year later, still in hell

It was just about this time last year that a dangerous chance of a lifetime descended on us. Something that you could contract like the common flu meant that I also had an equal chance of getting it. And if I was most unfortunate to pick it up from my barber or at my favourite bar made me a potential carrier of COVID-19.

There was no high mountaintop cave that we could run away to if we had loved ones who we wanted to protect. And to make matters a million times worse, there was no guarantee that we could just ride it out to a safe recovery if we were unlucky enough to catch it. As it made its very certain way across the globe, it obviously became most infamous not for those who survived it, bu,t for those who it struck down in its rampage across all countries on all continents.

The main difference between March 2020 and one year later in March 2021 is that vaccines are now on the market. That in itself has provided the global population with a major groundswell of hope even as people all over are beginning to bolt from the holding area, thinking quite wrongly that it is the best time to bolt and ride freely out in the pasture like animals penned up for one year too long.

Throughout most of last year, we endured seeing our main marketplace for tourism, North America and European destinations, freeze up on us as the United States under Donald Trump hopped, and skipped his way into policy ignorance . America left its failures on many parts of Europe as Jamaica stood by and dutifully awaited its chance to prove to the world that we also would mess up as the one-year anniversary rolled over on us.

She is 41 years old and her mother is 70. The mother moved from Jamaica to Georgia seven years ago. “I am not taking any vaccines,” she says. Then she went on a rant about Bill Gates and the usual chips under the skin.

“Mommy, when yu come to Jamaica is only me you have to stay with. I am sorry, but if you don’t take it, you cannot stay by me and run the risk of infecting me. This is damn foolishness bout Bill Gates and chips under skin.” In less than half an hour, the mother understood in the only way her daughter would use to bend her to her will and what she thought was the right path to take.

“I have every intention of taking the vaccine when my time comes around,” she told her mother.

“Let’s do this to protect ourselves.”

DIVINE INTERVENTION

I know of a woman who is 34 years old and fairly bright, with a high school education, but her church has convinced her that God will send her a message when “the time is right”.

“I have read up on the various vaccines, and I am still not convinced that they are safe,” she told me.

“Don’t you have brothers and sisters still living in Jamaica?”

She told me that she did but she didn’t encourage them to visit her. “We talk over the phone quite a lot. That will have to do for now.”

Then she asked me, “Do you intend to take the vaccine?” I told her yes, and there was a pause on the line. Then she said, much to my surprise, “If you take it, I will take it.”

My day was made.

It could be that I am a little not racist but not in the way that someone like Piers Morgan and many of those who roam the world of the British tabloids are.

At the very outset, the marriage between these two hopelessly struck with love, Prince Harry and Meghan, I could see the pain coming. I would stare at a picture of them holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, and the first thing that would jump out at me was the obvious happiness that existed between them.

SKIN TONE

Then it would dawn on me that Markle’s skin shade was so much easier on the eyes as a photo editor would see it. If other people saw it like I saw it, some people will believe that those who fall on the wrong side of the skin-shade ‘law’ may not dare to claim such beauty.

I have seen this before but not where it touches on royalty. Even with royalty involved, people know that it’s a made up of a reality that only exists if the majority of people in the world make the decision to commit to the very thing that is made up; some people having special blood and special rights and absolute rights as they did many years ago.

It would suit the young lovers to disappear into a wonderland, a Shangri La. That will not happen, and the world and the British tabloids will continue to chase them down and rain derision on them. They make the news for being themselves and because of them being who they are.

I hate to say it, but I am seeing a tragedy and a great heartbreak coming. Maybe not tomorrow or next week, but the tabloids will be seeking to have the last word.

No great fairy tale love ends like how they are scripted unless the lovers are strong enough to withstand the battering of those who may believe that they have earned no right to express such love, such vulnerabilities.

People like Piers Morgan may believe that they have earned the right to be callous and uncaring about the two lovers. To Morgan, it is Markle who has stepped out of her lane and into his.

- Mark Wignall is a political and public-affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com.