We are unavoidably becoming used to doing things differently, and seeing each other differently. SENAN photo, getting the food to those who can’t buy any in San Miguelito.
After the quarantine
Panama will be far more deeply in debt than the crisis level before the virus. The usual leading families will insist that everyone but themselves pay, but the rest of us won’t be able to pay.
The police will have suffered a great deal through no fault of their own, but on the other hand will have been possessed of unusually enhanced powers. The people who complained the most about their diminished freedom during the quarantine will in many cases be the very ones against whom the rest of us must guard our freedoms.
The president’s prestige ought to be enhanced, but to the extent that it should be, people will quickly forget. The churches, the local public officials and the legislature looked bad before the crisis and will look even worse afterward. Let us see whether the discredited courts will earn themselves some credit when they come back into session.
Our traditional dependent foreign relations will not have been helpful. Some of the foreign assistance will have come from unexpected friends. More than anything, we will have become accustomed to making do for ourselves more than we have.
Attitudes have changed, and will change. Not entirely, but we were a fractious society to begin with and delicate balances will have shifted. Expectations and alignments will be altered. There will be some conflict and chaos involved in arriving at the new normal.
But it will be a new Panama in many respects. Going back to what was will not be possible.
I’ve always said that in politics, your enemies can’t hurt you but your friends will kill you.
Ann Richards
Bear in mind…
Things do not change. We change.
Henry David Thoreau
For there is nothing on earth more acceptable to the Supreme Deity who rules over this whole world than the councils and assemblages of men bound together by law, which are called States.
Cicero
I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Ellen S. Hooper
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