The lessons we never learn

If there is one thing our recent history teaches us, it is how close we come to clarity just before turning away again. Time and again, society flirts with understanding what truly matters, only to resume its familiar, destructive rhythm, as if insight itself were too heavy to carry.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was forced to stop and look at itself. For a fleeting moment, the illusion cracked. We saw who really kept the lights on: not the executives working from home offices, but the nurses working double shifts, the cleaners disinfecting hospital corridors, the delivery drivers weaving through empty streets. They became the backbone of civilisation, holding everything together while being paid the least for it. We spoke their praises, clapped for them, promised to do better.

But once the crisis faded, the applause did too. Wages stayed low, job security stayed fragile, and the old hierarchies quietly reasserted themselves.

Now, a few years on, the pattern repeats, but the stage has changed. The recent oil crisis in the Strait of Hormuz has thrown global markets into panic. Tankers delayed, prices surging, nations scrambling. It is the same old story: a world balanced on the edge of instability because our energy system depends on a substance controlled by a handful of men whose motives shift with the wind. And yet, it could be our chance, a sharp reminder that fossil fuels are not just environmentally catastrophic but politically and morally unsustainable.

This should be the point where we make the final, irrevocable commitment to renewable energy, where we seize the technology, the science, and the moral clarity that already exist, and turn crisis into transformation.

But will we? History suggests otherwise. Governments will smooth the crisis, markets will stabilise, and within months we will have forgotten how vulnerable we are. Because that is what we do: we survive just long enough to forget what survival cost us.

And that, perhaps, is our greatest tragedy, not that we do not know what is important, but that knowing has never been enough to change us.

We are forever told by those in power that there is just not the money or the means to make these changes, or that it is better to act with pragmatism and make deals with people who would burn the world to ash so that they can be kings of the cinder.

This is a lie. A dangerous and pernicious lie.

If governments cannot or will not change direction towards a brighter future, then the burden falls upon us. We must refuse to let indecision and greed write the story of our world. I look at my daughter and cannot accept that she should grow up into a planet poisoned by short-sightedness, a society that prizes profit over people, and a future teetering on collapse. She deserves better. Every child does.

We have the power to change it, but not someday. now. In every vote cast, every protest joined, every conversation that challenges complacency, we shape the world they will inherit. If those in power will not steer us toward a clean, fair, safe, and just world, then we must take the wheel ourselves. The time for waiting has passed. The future will be what we fight for today.