Here we are / Here we go

Are we surprised this is happening?

The Coronavirus is shutting down the world. First, we were in denial. Then, we were told to practice social distancing and stock up on supplies and food. Because the next stage will be called “sheltering in place while a lot of people die.” Many of us are blowing this off. Because these things can’t happen to us, right? We can just pay someone else to fix it.

A friend of mine from high school just said goodbye to his dad, who died from COVID-19 at age 76. He is the first documented fatality in Ohio. Another friend’s dad is on a ventilator on the ICU in Oregon, awaiting his test results. There will be more people like this that we know. Maybe our own parents. Maybe us.

There are 7.7 billion of us on this planet, all trying to live our lives the only way we know how. But the way we have been doing it is just not sustainable. There are too many of us. We have been treating this planet like some sort of magic, inexhaustible all-you-can-eat buffet — gorging and killing and polluting and consuming for too long without asking for the check. And now Mother Nature is on her way over to out table to tell us it’s time to pay.

The SARS outbreak in 2003 was traced back to a wet market in Guangdong Province. Who knows if this latest strain of Darwin-award-herd-thinner actually started in a wet market in Wuhan, from a bat, or a snake, or some other poor unsuspecting species. Does it even matter where this started? Just the fact that these kinds of places exist — where countless animals, many endangered, are slaughtered and sold for humans to consume — is terrifying enough. It’s everything that’s wrong with humans, concentrated into one small, disturbing instance. Sort of like our President.

We have pushed things too far, and a lot of people are going to die because of it. And it’s going to suck. Badly. Really badly for some. But if that’s what it takes for us to learn our lesson, then that’s what it takes. We keep trying to beat the system, but in the end the system always wins. We are all part of the problem. But ultimately, we will learn from this.

Things have to change.

Things are changing.

And I’m not surprised.