ADUN SPEAKS | The return to normalcy must not be a return of the old ways

ADUN SPEAKS | Imagine if you couldn’t leave the house for the foreseeable future. What little work you were able to do before is no longer available as an option. Your daily sustenance is in total reliance of help by charitable parties, which may end at any given moment.

Your spouse was hit by a stroke in the third week of the movement control order (MCO), and now needs expert treatment by healthcare professionals thrice a week. You have to take care of your bedridden spouse, which is actually way beyond your physical and financial means. You have no family nor friends you can rely on.

Imagine if you are a single, daily waged hotel kitchen cleaner who takes care of your elderly mother whose health recently deteriorated. She became wheelchair-bound and incontinent during MCO in your zinc roofed house. You have no savings to speak of.

You are not able to work during the MCO, neither do you see the prospects of work because your employer's company has just folded. Your income which barely met your needs before MCO when you had work, gives a picture of the future that is unthinkable.

Imagine if you are a 70-year-old mother to a mentally disabled son in his forties. You survived by collecting and sorting waste and selling cardboard and tins, or whatever you may find for one meal a day. Another meal comes from a charitable organisation who delivers a meal 5 days a week.

Your landlord, who allows you to stay rent-free at their termite ridden part of their house is unable to fix the damage sustained during the freak storm that occurred during the MCO. The gaping hole over your bedroom ceiling is only going to get worse. Meanwhile, you can't even go out to earn the piecemeal income you had before.

To these Malaysians, a return to normalcy will be a return to what got them into their now irreversible torture in the first place. As one lady whose plight is one of those described above said, "MCO or not makes no difference, I will just let the days pass by; my life will be much easier if it didn't continue."

The pandemic as a mirror of society's ills

Whenever the question of "when will we return to any degree of normalcy" arises, I shudder at the thought that some of us are still of the presumption that we still have that as an option.

Let's be clear: What is happening right now, is nothing short of an imposed revolution by nature itself. We are now moving into a new economic world order, form and substance of which no one is able to model or predict. When the economy changes, society changes and vice versa.