It’s hard to grasp our situation. We’ve never had such granular ability to observe a virus spread or shut down our economy before. This is unknown ground for all of us.
Our leaders, political, medical and economic, say we can come out of this and restart our engine and take off. We’re spending trillions of dollars to try and hold the parts of the economic engine together while providing billions of dollars to beat the virus. Will it work? Only time will tell. And that’s the key here, time.
We are learning some things about ourselves, such as; we apparently need toilet paper above anything else, so the cleanliness of our butt’s is important; there are more people in service jobs than anyone thought about, and without them working, our way of life is very different; and sadly, for a lot of people, that staying home is hard.
However, the biggest lesson in this is that we are not outside of nature. We are biological animals, and even though we have smartphones, iPads, laptops, social media, instant connectedness, 24-hour involvement, games, music, etc., that seem to make us feel like we are not part of a herd, we are. We are one species of animal in nature, and it is to our peril when we forget this.
The natural cycle is for a herd to grow and shrink. Since we believe we are not part of a natural cycle, we believe we can grow indefinitely with no repercussions. I’m not sure nature sees it that way. We may be a parasite the Earth feels needs to be managed; who knows?
One thing is for sure, which is a central theme of The Wilson Chronicles, is we must get off this planet if we are to survive. Otherwise, one day, something truly deadly is going to come along, and we will have no ability to stand against it.
Glenn Jackson, Author 