The Plague

 

 

Our struggle for survival has been an up and down affair since we dropped from the trees and shambled out into the grass lands.  It’s been a tale of ups and downs in our journey through history, periodically bringing us close to the endangered species list, if there had been one.  Now our numbers seem to pad such edges.  Thousands, even millions might die, but we make so many more, so fast that there seems no end in sight. 

Disease is frightening.  Contagious bugs that move from one to the other touch a cord, if not in our conscious minds then somewhere in memories passed down from ancestors who watched their families and even towns die from the Black Death, or Small pox, or Cholera.  Such specters have haunted us since we stood up.  They sneak into our fortresses, under our gates, past our privilege and bring us down, peasant and king alike. 

Are they punishments for neglecting our God?  Are they cruel tricks of some demonic spoiler?  Are they merely evidence of the vulnerability of all life?  Whatever they may be, they remind us of our fragility and demand that we climb down from our high and mighty attitudes and adopt humility not as a virtue, but as a way of life. 

But far beneath the discussion of cosmic perpetrators lies a more basic issue.  The plagues we fear are dwarfed by our own success at survival.  It has become a plague in itself.  The sixth great extinction that is shutting down polar bears and frogs and corals, bats and bees and bluebirds is not the result of some massive asteroid or even some silent virus, it is the result of the relentless pressure of our infestation of every nook and cranny of our planet, including its seas and atmosphere.  Our light, our heat, our noise, our lack of restraint have created a place where life is struggling to survive. 

It is hard to see ourselves and our off spring as a plague.  But what else can we call it?  Such dark thoughts trouble our dreams and darken our days. 

There is a Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’  Surely that we do.  The challenges of this day seem daunting to a species so young and too powerful for its small measure of wisdom.  Perhaps the impractical lessons that call us beyond our roots of dominance and self-importance, the ones that we are left with when we face Ebola, the ones that are the only options to fear could apply here as well.   We do have options, we always have options.  They may not be easy.  They may demand that we grow beyond the laws of tooth and claw.  They demand that we become more than the ultimate survivors.  They demand that we become truly human, even in these interesting times.

I’m pulling for us.  After all, we invented the cello and pecan pie.