HIEA 114 Medium Post #2
Throughout this course, I learned that mutual aids are important to maintain the world. And also, mutual aids are everywhere. As I re-read Jennifer Cooke’s article at the end of the quarter, I kind of understand why she can be so sure about the pandemic not only brings us bad things but also changes the world in some good ways. She knows it from the history. There are many historical facts about mutual aid that are left to us. One of the ways is through storytelling.
In Christopher Nelson’s book, he recorded several stories from Okinawan people. I really like when people trying to tell their own stories because it is one way to know more about the facts and knowledge that we do not know or are not familiar with previously. There are many things in the history that we do not have the opportunity to know about. For example, who knows how ancient Chinese farmers actually live their lives? In ancient times, it was hard to record stories for the people in the future, aka us. But it is different now. Keeping documents becomes so easy to do. I think this is good because our posterity would be able to have so much information about our era. Therefore, it is the time to gather more stories from different perspectives in different areas, especially those who usually do not speak out.
Back to Cooke’s article. She sees similar situations as now in the past, so she believes we as humans would choose the same road. We will try to help each other out when there is huge crisis that affects everyone. Here is where mutual aid comes in. We have done so many different mutual aids throughout the history. We are just doing it again during the pandemic. This pandemic is something that should be recorded and be known by our posterity. Maybe several centuries later, similar thing would happen again. Then, people in that time would know what to do because they have already learned from the history, which might be us or more ancient people that are even before us.
Talking about the mutual aid in Japan during the pandemic, the first thing comes to my mind is Japan gifting vaccines to Taiwan despite China’s hindering. Taiwan also gave masks to Japan in return. Many countries began to help each other like this because it can make the situation better. COVID-19 affects the world too much, so it is necessary to work together to get back on the right track.
