Then

Revolutionary War. 1812. The Civil War. The Cholera epidemic. WWI. Spanish Flu. WWII. Korean War. Vietnam. Coronavirus.

In terms of the level of sacrifice required to endure these events, you'd better believe that what we're going through now in April of 2020 stacks up. You are here, now, in this moment. In terms of lives lost, we've experienced xx so far, and can expect to lose xxx in total. When you think of moments in the American story and where you were, this one stacks up with the most significant one's in our history.

This one is ours.

I remember where I was on 9-11. Freshly woken up for yet another lecture from my Econ 101 professor at 7:30am, I lumbered toward the communal bathroom of my dorm, caddy in hand. I was halfway through brushing my teeth when a dormmate let out the news, and the next thing I knew I was glued to a tv, watching as the second plane hit tower 2. We watched both towers fall together that day, in a 12 story dorm tower ourselves. The rest of they day was a series of canceled classes and indecision, as students fanned out around campus to make their own reconciliations with a frightful present and unknown future.

We all know the outcome of that day. Millions dead in Afghanistan and Iraq combined, followed by countless dead in the Arab Spring of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, etc. The effects endure to this day. I ended up joining the military because of what I saw that day in 2001, and I feel the effects viscerally.

Now

Today it is Apr 20th, 2020 and although 40,000 people are dead from the coronavirus, it doesn't really feel like much of an event. I should say, 40,000 people in the US are dead. What sets this apart from those events I've mentioned at the beginning is that this is the first time in a long while in which our sorrows are collective over the whole planet. Japan lements, Germany laments, as do Russia, the UK, France, and for all I know the Sudan. We are all brothers.

It doesn't feel significant, and yet we know that in the US something like 200k will eventually die, a figure that easily surpasses the war dead in the US from Vietnam and the Korean War combined. Is it less significant due to the fact that it will disproportionately take the older half of the population, or more? War takes the young--plague takes the old. I don't think that the differences are so great. Both, in the experience, feel arbitrary. Both, in the experience, feel pointless or preventable. Both, in the experience, feel out of our own individual control to stop.

I can tell you one large difference. My own day to day life is largely adequate, and perhaps even improved. I stay at home from my work to mitigate the spread of this disease, and although I do try my best to put in an honest day's work remote from my team, it is obvious that I am less able to carry out the work I do. Ironically, as a member of the military, I am not the right tool to bring to bear for this particular task, and so I am left to wait on standby for the day when I might be useful in defending the country. I have taken this in stride, recognizing and even appreciating that the future is uncertain and perhaps Fate loves a good irony. Those sworn to defend this nation are, in this circumstance at least, unfit to carry out that role. We rely on people who never asked for that mantle to keep us clothed, fed, and cared for in our time of greatest need.

This strange conflict is ours. Whatever becomes of it will be the result of our collective will and action, spurred on by either our leadership, or the lack of it. It is said that animals act according to their biology. As animals, we too are bound by biology, and are intertwined with the other organisms of this planet to endure what interplay comes along to test us now. But where we differ in in our ability to form culture. We can suffer like animals, or we can choose to change and meet the foe intelligently. Whatever path we are on, we can choose to change immediately. Therefore, whatever happens in the long run against this invisible foe is soley on our shoulders, and how we meet it or fail to is a one sided affair.

Remember where you are now, when all this has happened around you. This is your time. Its our time to own up to and act in the best interest of all.

If you are alive right now, in this uncertain time, you are my sibling, my coworker--you are my trenchmate. This is where we endure together in the same fight. I will rely on you to do the best that you can to see us through. You can count on me to do the same.

I want to say something in story form that shows how for ages and ages, we've had no good remedy for some problems that happen to us. For the vast majority of our history, the answer, the story of us has been that we just endure sickness until our collective biology can cope. Those scars are hard won, and many individuals paid the price for our geneticly inherited resistance to various diseases.

Hope

But there is another kind of ability that we have, and that is this: through a lot of people thinking about a problem in a certain way, or sometimes by accident, we can arrive at a technique or solution that solves the problem for everyone. Discovery is an amazingly important thing--but what is even more amazing is the human ability to reconfigure our minds to collectively adapt whatever new practice aids our survival. With remarkable quickness, any of us/all of us, if we want, can change our behavior to better meet challenges from the outside world. We can all adopt the best strategies from those rare discoveries.

The Lapp herdsman can tomorrow, with some effort, become an urbanite. He is not bound by his biology alone, as is the reindeer. His habits can change.

And so, in relation to disease, we have very recently in the human story encountered methods that work against disease that don't require the endurance and risktaking that entire populations used to suffer. We can take the best methods our distant ancestors used, and couple them with the best efforts our more recent ones used, and couple that on up to the very present. This ability is uniquely human--no animal exists that can do anything other than huddle and wait when a new disease emerges. Rather, as we huddle in our homes, we know that it is only a matter of time before we'll know more, and have some constructed answer to how to defend ourselves. This is because there is a worldwide army of scientists and medical professionals learning about the disease. What our best minds discover, we can all copy and learn from. This is our special ability, and part of what makes us unique as humans.