Something positive for a change.
There is an article in The Guardian by Rutger Bregman titled The real Lord of the Flies, that as the name suggests, describes a real-world version of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. One in which six schoolboys, stranded on an island for fifteen months, far from regressing to savagery, built a functioning and caring social unit.
To quote from the article;
[The island] Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.”
The story is a welcome reminder that most people are basically good (and competent).
It’s also a reminder that if six schoolboys could build a functioning caring community from nothing, equipped with little more than determination we should be able to rebuild our country once the plagues, both human and viral, pass into history next year.