A Lesson For Civilization

The world has had a pandemic a long time coming. And we were, and still are not, prepared for one. Someday, a very contagious and deadly disease will appear, and will begin to spread at incredible rates. But it is in this very moment, where billions of people are quarantined in some manner or another, where humanity decides how bad this pandemic will be. 

Before now, the progress of civilization has seemed almost unstoppable, and in this unprecedented time of commodities that would have seemed to be unimaginable luxuries merely a century ago we failed to appreciate the incredible nature of our interconnected planet. We believed that we were invincible, and for those who suffered from disasters, well, they simply weren’t. But this age of naïveté has been destroyed by this pandemic, and invincibility has been replaced by rising numbers of unemployment, disease cases, and deaths. 

This, right now, as you are reading this, lies a lesson for civilization. We have been forced to realize that we are not invincible, that these disasters — previously reserved for the “other” — can and will happen to us; and therefore we must plan accordingly. We can no longer ignore science and history: we must learn and remember it so we may prevent the past from so eerily happening again — because a highly contagious and deadly pandemic will happen, someday: and we must be prepared for it.