March 1, 2020. Our nation was at full employment, the lowest unemployment rates among women and minorities in our history. A couple of months later over 26 million Americans are out of work. The sky fell, hair salon owners are being jailed because they won’t apologize to judges. Small cafes in Colorado are being stomped on for offering an omelet for Mother’s Day. The Chinese are claiming they had nothing to do with this. The World Health Organization has no idea. We, folks, have a virus pandemic/epidemic plague.
As the smartest talk show host I know is me, and the literary giant I have become, I have spent the past six weeks reading about mother nature’s little nasty bastards, the viruses. I’ve become a great respecter of viruses. In fact, I’m in awe of the little guys. It’s important to note viruses don’t have any politics. They don’t circle in the air deciding which minority person to drop on. They don’t think at all. They’re not political, they’re not analytical. They’re viruses dude.
They’re not Trump’s virus, not Putin’s virus, not Merkel’s virus. In reading the middle eastern press, the Iranians believe it’s the Israeli’s virus. And in our country, the major media, the progressives and the deep state believe Trump owns this virus.
The first recorded instance of virus is 5,000 years ago when an epidemic wiped out a prehistoric village in China. The bodies of the dead were stuffed inside a house that was later burned down. Starting to understand this now? Throughout history these have come before and will come again.
The Black Death radically changed the course of history. I am currently reading about Napoleon sending an army to Haiti, to quell a slave rebellion. Disease killed them all. Subsequently, Napoleon was flat broke and sold the Louisiana Purchase to Thomas Jefferson for money. The plague hit Europe in 1347. Most historians believe it came from, guess where, China; to the Crimea; and to Sicily. And then in 1352, the Black Death petered out. But it killed about a third of Europe and returned five times before the end of the century killing at least half of the continent’s population or 80 million people. That you guys, is a virus.
I read David Hackett Fischer’s book, The Great Wave. How many times these eruptions have come. Including the 17th century and 1850s in the Middle East. Recommended reading: Davis Quammen’s Spillover. He cites viruses as lions in the Serengeti. And when they kill, they kill the old, fat, weak zebras and the slow and sick wildebeests. When we look at how many died are they not the equivalent of the old zebras and wildebeests?
But we have been through SARS, MERS, Swine flu, Avian flu, Hong Kong flu, Spanish flu. Last month we talked about the brilliance of medical science eliminating polio, measles, and smallpox. This, some scientists argue, is not really the next big one. The next big one they say will be the equivalent of the Spanish flu. And my friends, that’s coming.
The viruses have stopped the Crusades after nine attempts. Probably helped the Bolshevik Revolution, destroyed the Roman Empire, knocked the living daylights out of the German army and stopped the U.S. from invading Canada. Viruses are to be gazed upon as phenomenal and there’s not going to be any inoculations to make people well and better, but my reading suggests only a couple of things can happen. One, like SARS it goes into a reservoir somewhere, or it morphs and that’s very Darwinian. Or we adapt to it which is what some people believed happened eventually in 1920. Or it hangs around and we all go back to work.
But it has no politics, no intelligence. It is only what it is and what it does. It’s the coronavirus. Like it or not, it doesn’t care at all about what you think.
— Peter Boyles
