Big Killers...
So let them eat candy
Sunday is Halloween, historically known as All Hallow’s Eve. It’s a time of play acting our favorite characters, whilst being scared of ghosts and things that go bump in the night.
Not to worry. I won’t scare you with yet another history lesson on Halloween, and the Irish pagan versus the Christian holiday, blah, blah, blah. That isn’t the purpose of the History Desk, to give you normal history. Nah. The main purpose of the History Desk is to give my readers and students perspective. For example, this Covid virus. It scares many people. The vaccines scares even more people.
Okay folks, it's time for you to hold my beer.
You want a scary disease? I'll give you a scary disease. Variola. AKA, smallpox.
Variola has a mortality rate of 30%. If you get lucky and have the hemorrhagic variation, you get to die with your guts disintegrating, turning to mush and blood.
Not scary enough for you? Keep reading.
The creepiest disease, of course, is the Black Death. It is caused by a bacterium, yersinia pestis. That mortality rate can reach 60%. It’s a quick killer, much faster than its cousin, the bacterium tuberculosis. TB was known as the wasting disease because it tended to be a slow killer. TB holds the world’s record for killing the most human beings of any plague or pandemic, ever. Covid will not come within a fraction of a fraction of that goal. I say goal because it is the mission of these virus and bacteria to kill us, whilst they stay alive.
If that doesn’t creep you out, you are made of sterner stuff than I am.
Aside from easy going Covid, currently, many human beings also fear global warming. We are constantly warned, with religious fervor, by new age prophets, that the end is near. That we humans, once again, have sinned, and the puritans are lined up to wag their fingers at us for our greed. And make us change our wicked ways.
Global warming is scary because it will force some people to change. Like the aristocrats who have beach front property.
What people are afraid of is change. Actually, that is why people have revolutions. And revolutions are truly scary as they force change.
In truth, we cannot control Earth. What we call nature operates on quite rigid rules. Gravity and weather cannot be manipulated to suit our purposes. But Mother Earth and the universe she inhabits can change things, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye. And that is hugely frightening. Because the natural world can create something nasty. Really nasty to wipe out a few million, or billion, in one fell swoop. It may come from the gods in the form of a big rock Zeus may throw at us. Or it may come from Hades, with a supervolcano eruption. The sun and its activities can also cause harmful effects on our modern electrical systems. Solar flares can shut down our power grids for weeks or months.
Global warming is a nice, easy thing that will, one day, turn into a cool down phase. Perhaps another mini ice age, or a more serious ice age? Who knows. And then? We can complain that our electrical cars are causing the water in the ocean to retreat and the rich will build new houses on new stretches of beaches.
We like to worry about global warming and Covid because we can handle it. Like smallpox, it is controllable. We now have antibiotics for horrors like the plague. There's even a vaccine for TB. But the really bad stuff?
The best perspective is to kiss your loved ones, daily, eat candy on Halloween, and enjoy your life today. Let the gods worry about tomorrow.