28 September

It's not an analogy for me that pandemics are the rebooting of societies. It's their job, throughout history. To force us to throw out everything we think we know and question everything we do. They can do that because we're all made of microbes, and they're the only thing that force us to break every bond and connection we've built, even between each other. Other natural disasters drive us closer together, because you can't catch a volcano from the person next to you. We need profound humility to ever defeat pandemics. We have to accept them as a message, as even the Bible does. But we're not there yet, we have vain roosters crowing about managing the virus and getting economies going, or telling everybody else that they're too afraid (the macho chest-beating virus deniers and their 'wellness' mumbo jumbo), or whining about lockdowns interfering with their freedom, or telling us that people will top themselves en masse if ordinary life is interrupted. There is no 'normal life' free of infection, even outside pandemics. Infection is what clobbers us when we forget our link to wider ecosystems. 10 million of us a year could die from basic infections by 2050. We still have some way to go to discover our humility. I'm not holding my breath.