Editor’s Note: There is a swirl in the air, not uncommon at the start of the holiday season, but this one is different. It is different by design. Governors seem to be competing for Emmy awards. It is a curious thing. Arrias takes a look this morning at how we are dealing with the essence of life in this time of plague.

– Vic

Billions Will Die

One half of everyone you know – at least – will be dead by 2060.

Years ago there was series produced by the BBC called “Connections.” The premise of the show was that no single man, no single thing, happened in isolation, that everything was connected into a very complex web of people, things and ideas. Further, the show suggested that the impact of a series of events or discoveries is likely to be far broader – and different – than anything we can imagine.

That occurred to me this past week as I watched the ongoing legal wrangling having to do with the voting irregularities noted in a number of states during, and after, the November 3rd Election. And meanwhile, we are seeing reports of more people being tested “positive for the Wuhan virus.”

The two aren’t related in the common use of the word, but the two are, in the sense that the show might have used it, connected.

The virus has already had a major impact on the nation, beyond the people who have been sick, and have died, from the virus. The virus is responsible for not only a host of economic problems, but also for many of the changes that took place in how the election was held, and one might speculate that the particular responses that some states took to the virus resulted in a substantially different vote in the election. One might speculate as to what the long term effect of these various actions, but I’ll leave that to the reader.

Meanwhile, Mr Biden, presuming that he will, in the end, be in fact sworn in as President on January 20th next, promises to “crush” the virus.

As Dr. Ted Noel points out in an article in “Townhall,” you can’t actually crush a virus. Arguably, about the worse thing we can do to fight this virus is to keep everybody at a distance, and live behind our masks. Noel makes a point that not only is there no real benefit to wearing a mask vis-a-vis a virus, there’s a real concern that we are interrupting the body’s process for dealing with viruses, that what the bulk of the population needs is regular, frequent low level exposure to viruses in order to develop resistance. Trying to convert all of your living spaces into NASA clean rooms is not simply not going to work, in the end it will make you weaker.

Why then do otherwise intelligent people seem to become apoplectic over the issue of masks and social distancing and the fear of catching the virus?

If you recall: while 240,000 people in the US have died with the virus, only roughly 6% of those (15,000 give or take) have died strictly from the virus. Everyone else had some other major health issue. This is sad but true. I have several friends who had serious heart issues, or are fighting cancer and they are rightly extra careful. But they were extra careful before the Wuhan virus showed up. As a doctor explained it to me many years ago when I was visiting a friend on a cancer ward: “Very few people here actually die of cancer; they die of colds or flus, they get pneumonias or they have some other complication. If they were healthy, they could fight it off. But they are so weak from fighting the cancer that a cold can kill them.”

But no one says that they died of pneumonia; they died from cancer.
But if this is so, then why the inordinate level of fear? Leaving aside those with real health issues and hence, real concerns, otherwise healthy people seem to be terrified of what is, in fact, statistically, no worse than any other flu. But, could it be that they have been whipped into a lather by the constant drumbeat of the press, and for the first time in many of their lives, they are having to address their own mortality?

It’s interesting that the world seems to have a much harder time dealing with death than it used to. Why isn’t clear, but I would offer a few thoughts:

First and foremost, the modern world, particularly if you live in the US or Europe, has been for the last 75 years remarkably peaceful. We may have spectacular news coverage of riots or whatever, but if you look at the numbers and compare today to the 1930s, or even the 1950s, crime rates are down – a great deal. We have more and more coverage of less and less violence.

Second, in the West, wars are now fought exclusively by volunteer militaries. And they are fought somewhere else. Yugoslavia’s breakup in the 1990s is estimated to have resulted in 130,000 dead. That’s the closest Western Europe has come to war in 75 years. The 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland resulted in fewer than 4,000 dead. Ugly, but hardly a wave of death. (To put this in perspective, the Balkans war of 1911 – the prologue to the slaughterhouse that was World War I – resulted in more than 150,000 dead. Outside the West, the seemingly never-ending Congo Civil War that began in the early 1990s resulted in between 3 and 5 million dead).

Third, modern medicine has produced marvels. Many diseases that were once death sentences are no longer grave dangers.

Fourth, no one sees death anymore. People used to die at home. Grandpa and Grandma died in their bedrooms. As kids you saw Grandpa slow down, then not get out of bed, etc. He might go to the hospital for the last few days, but everyone understood what was happening. Now, folks are shuffled off to “Retirement Homes” and effectively disappear. And the virus has actually made this much worse.
So, we’ve grown accustomed to peaceful, healthy, pleasant lives. And we don’t talk about death. Suddenly, a new threat appears. Ignorance, fear, and the desire of some people to use any potential crisis as an opportunity and presto, we have our current angst.

The press, for what reasons we can only wonder, seem to want to make the Wuhan Virus the centerpiece to all reporting for all time; tied tightly to the constant drum-beat against everything Mr Trump said and did. Many complained about what he did, but made no substantive recommendations different from Mr. Trump. Nor did they explain how it was that they could on the one hand curse Mr. Trump for being too authoritarian while at the same time lambaste him for his failing to assert an unconstitutional degree of power over the 50 governors, disregarding that we’re a republic and the system is designed for states to develop their own answers, rather than trying to come up with one answer for everyone. Thankfully, for the people in nursing homes, everyone didn’t follow the New York model.

At the same time we have an education system and a news media that has endeavored to remove any consideration, or even discussion, of God or mortality from the daily dialogue. The desire seems to be to turn us all into strict materialists. But the problem with materialism is that it doesn’t answer fundamental questions, particularly when mortality rears its head.

The fact is that we’re all going to die, every one of us. On an average day in the US 7,500 people die. No major problems, no crisis. Just the reality of our mortality. Between now and the end of the century virtually everyone alive will die – close to 8 billion deaths. We will all be dead.

My personal opinion is that the failure to deal with that singular truth is at the root of our frantic response to this virus.

Should we do something about this?

About the virus? Certainly.

About other medical issues? Indeed.

But we also need to remember that we’re mortal. It probably is worth a little consideration on a daily basis. It’s called life. We’re born, we live, we die. We all do it. Every single one of us. Even Hollywood movie stars, sports legends and Silicon Valley billionaires.

And there is the real connection…

Copyright 2020 Arrias
www.vicsocotra.com