MARCH 25 — I am not trained in economics, but it’s easy enough to deduce the compounding effect on prices.

Everything will cost more and people already struggling will feel the pain first.

Some of us will glibly announce we will start making our own coffee now but for others it’s a smaller portion of an already meagre ration of rice.

There is one small dim silver lining to Trump’s madness.

“It doesn’t affect me,” people say about politics, global affairs, everything outside their comfortable bubble.

We can’t stuff the genie of globalisation back into the bottle.

Perhaps some of us will finally understand that none of us will be safe from suffering until everyone is.

Maybe it is wishful thinking, to hope for a better world and better people to emerge from this world on fire.

Yet that is what I must believe.

We are a species defined by belief.

Animals do not need to believe in anything.

Even atheists believe.

Their dogma, believing this life is all we have and that there is nothing beyond the doorway of death, is still a kind of faith.

What I think is that too many of us are fixated on the end times.

Every year I have been alive someone has declared the world is ending.

I guess God is also the god of procrastination.

We do not truly live in unprecedented times.

We have just forgotten that powerful idiots will constantly destabilise the world just because they can.

Since we can never be free of idiots, we can only free ourselves from our own idiocy, even if it’s just the little things.

A friend confided in me that looking back on when her daughter was small, she had been so preoccupied and stressed by things she now sees were just trifles.

The world’s troubles will affect us all in the coming months so perhaps it might just be what wakes us up, if we’ve been sleepwalking most of our lives.

It has been shown that in the hardest of times the best in us will still prevail, the way it did during the early days of the pandemic.

Let’s hope it doesn’t again take the worst of times to bring out the best in us.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.