Scary rapid changes in face of pandemic

A couple of days ago, my 10-year-old eagerly asked me to Google the word ‘typewriter’. It turned out that they had learnt about it in their Zoom class that morning.

They had been told it was the machine that people used before the computer was invented. He wanted to see what this apparatus looked like.

I obliged, and together we scrolled through several photos of typewriters, after which he declared that they looked “funny” and must have been “boring” because people couldn’t watch videos on them.

He then promptly lost interest in the archaic-looking appliances. It is then that it occurred to me that I was introduced to the typewriter in high school when I was in Form Three, and would see my first computer several years later, an overweight and bloated-looking thing that had to be rebooted several times to work.

 Just a couple of years later, along came thinner and lighter and better-looking machines, phasing out the one with the protruding tummy.

MOBILE PHONES

Anyway, this conversation with my son brought to the fore just how different a world we’re raising our children in. As if that remainder wasn’t enough, just a few days after this incident, my seven-year-old daughter looked up from the cellphone she had been engrossed with and asked, “Mum, when you wanted to talk to your friends in…was it the eighties? You used to walk to their house?”

I could not help laughing out aloud because the way she phrased the question, it was as if the eighties was the period Before Christ.

Yes, I had to admit that I wasn’t young anymore. Still amused, I decided to take the opportunity to teach her some history and googled images of telephone booths, which I told her are what I used to call my friends whenever I wanted to talk to them. She was taken aback, exclaiming in horror, “Mobile phones used to be big like that?!” and looked even more horrified when she learnt that the booths were not installed in someone’s compound.

After these two conversations with my children, I could not help wondering how much will have changed in a mere 10 years from now if typewriters and telephone booths, which some of us used the other day, now belong in a museum.

It’s almost scary, this rapid change, especially in the face of Covid-19, this disease that scientists all over the world have been unable to unravel seven months later, a disease that keeps changing face every month, getting more and more complicated and deadly.

Although I am mostly an optimistic person, it makes one wonder what other challenges await us in the future, and whether humanity will manage to weather them.

But I take comfort in the fact that human beings are adaptable, we are, in fact, the most adaptive species on earth, scientists say, therefore it could be just a matter of time before we figure out this virus and learn to ‘peacefully’ co-exist with it if we don’t manage to get a cure.

But this optimism fades away whenever I see the disregard with which some Kenyans are treating this virus, the ones that are still intent on partying, holding onto the vibrant social lives they had before Covid-19, drinking past curfew hours in bars that are above the law with their maskless friends, high-fiving and fist-bumping and hugging as if there isn’t a marauding virus that thrives in exactly this kind of behaviour.

The writer is Editor, Society & Magazines, Daily Nation [email protected]