Now everyone was trembling. With the news of the war, our other fights and bustles became a bit secondary, as the shadow of the war looms ever more terrifyingly over Central Europe. Restlessness has somehow moved into our guts, as we see the fierce struggle for survival going on right here next door.
The air is permeated by bombs and hits in residential buildings, schools, and hospitals where until then peaceful, civilized life was going on, people simply lived their everyday lives. If a fighter jet with a huge bang appeared in the sky earlier, we would just stare with appreciation at what technology can do with our children and grandchildren. Now we don't think so, but we are afraid of them and are terrified that these machines will appear as monsters at any moment, followed by speeding, death-spewing tanks.
We are uneasy because the "futuristic" Israeli scientist Yuval Noah Harari - whose books are almost biblically circulated by politicians and people in public life - was not at all right that the three great dangers that threatened humanity in the past: the deadly pandemics, the threats of world wars and the we have already overcome the famine. (Homo Deus, 2016). So ahead is the new challenge towards the dystopia of humanity controlled and subjugated by algorithms.
But no! Three years after the book was written, a terrible epidemic hit the world in the form of Covid-19 and its mutants, and then a few days ago a real Russian-Ukrainian war, reminiscent of World War II, broke out in Europe.
Here, young guys control combat vehicles and planes not on the joysticks of digital games, but in reality. Moreover, now they only have one life, which unfortunately more and more people are losing and more and more families are going crazy, mourning and fleeing.
Suddenly, many of us understood that not only every Hungarian is responsible for every Hungarian, but every person is also responsible for every person. At other times, our daily worries that cause anxiety become dwarfed and it becomes clear how fragile our (self)believed to be secure world is and how true it is that we can only rely on each other in this ark. We have become quieter, more inclusive. God, whom many had banished from their lives, came closer, as well as his gift of love, long prayers and protection to the suffering.
We have to realize that we have not outgrown the weaknesses of human history, we have just enough reason to beautify and see our selfish and limitless individual aspirations differently. We all need God's mercy and grace. According to ourselves, we always read something different from the future than what will happen. We can't even foresee our dystopias.
"Cover us with your great wings, watchful night sky"
Featured image: author
Quoted poem: Miklós Radnóti: I don't know
