What We Learned in School – Pandemic’s Aren’t the Only Repeat Offenders
So, I remember in high school I did a report on the Black Plague. To give a synopsis of it: The Black Plague came upon European sailors when they returned to their ports in Messina. Most of the men were dead, the rest were fatally ill with black boils on their skin that bled, full of puss. Gruesome sight, and the doctors at the time had no idea what to do, and how bad it was going to get. To remember myself, as a teenager, going through some articles and a book or two in our library about a distant plague, one that killed too many people to count, thinking ‘that could never happen now, to me, to us.’ But here were our, a quarter through 2020, struggling to find answers as thousands of people die to an unknown disease,
Each step of our current pandemic has really coincided with what happened over six centuries ago. The plague started in the West. Rumors about a disease from China and India that was killing people by the hundreds was talked amongst townsfolk, written about every now and then in newspapers and shared between visiting friends. It wasn’t until the plague reached Europe’s land that people started to realize just how bad it was. Suddenly, symptoms like fever, chills, severe swelling of armpits and groins, and unbelievable pains that racked their body came upon the unsuspecting citizens. People were catching it faster than doctors could treat it. Rats that were commonplace in the Urban areas were spreading it, it floated through the air, and it was even reported that people who made contact from cloth to cloth could catch it.
What was worse is as time went on, they began to understand how it was spreading, by rodents and fleas that came in contact with pets, and from there came in contact with people, their food, their clean water. The infections was everywhere. These pests were common places on ships, and for a long time, ships had continued to dock and trade and sell and travel, especially at the beginning stages of the plague. From Messina it traveled across Europe, hitting Rome in Italy, and even spreading to North Africa. A significant chunk of the population died, because treatments and spread of information on how to stop the spreading and how awful the disease was had been limited. It spread for years and for a while, it seemed like there would be no relief from the plague.
The similarities in a way, to what we now call COVID-19 are shockingly almost perfect. We see how it is a disease that began in Western culture, China, that slowly spread. China has always been a big point of trade and heavily rooted in most countries production and economy, and even now, that hasn’t changed. So as people and items and whatever else traveled from China to country to country, the disease slowly, but steadily spread. And even though other countries were aware of it, ignorance took hold. There wasn’t a stop on ports or trade, there wasn’t a plan set to keep people safe, and there certainly wasn’t a lot of focus on others who were becoming sick and losing their life in other countries.
See the resemblance?
I think what’s made this harder to stomach is the amount of fearmongering done in the media, social networking sites, and between governments. I’ve read one too many articles about Asian-Americans getting attacked and discriminated against because of how the coverage of this is handled. You know when people call COVID-19 the ‘Chinese Virus’ or whatever, just makes it worse. Then there are the conspiracy theorists, who find ways to pin this as an attack from our own government, from 5G towers, trying to control our minds and how we live. We are creatures of habit, and when faced with a disease as unconceivable as this one, where in a blink of an eye you, your friends, your social media followers, have all lost someone dear, or are afraid for their lives, we tend to need to find someone to blame. We can hide behind a mask of ignorance, saying it’s someone’s fault, because then we have less culpability in how we act. This kind of reasoning is why people don’t stay home, or why we ignored it so long. It was easy to ignore, and now it’s easy to blame.
I don’t claim to be very world or aware, but two things that I believe in are very evident in this type of world. One, is that history tends to repeat itself. Yes, I know its been shoved down our throats in every world geography and civil war classes we’ve been forced to take as prepubescents and teens, but I think right now is a good time as any to point it out. A Pandemic that killed such a large chunk of the worlds populations, changed how medicine worked and how people make contact, over six hundred years ago, is happening again.
Another thing I know is that the world is resetting itself. Amidst all this tragedy, I’m seeing the articles talking about how pollution in the airs and the water is at an all time low. The hole in the ozone layer is healing, creatures like sea turtles can comfortably lay their eggs on beaches previously populated by littering humans. There’s beauty behind the ugly, and there is a rise of order coming from beneath all the chaos. I don’t think this is some big conspiracy or the fault of a race, but it was something that was going to happen no matter what we did, because that’s just the course of life. And after spending time looking back at history and how plagues worked their way through Earth, and this time around hopefully it’s a life lesson that changes how we approach and plan for disasters like these.
What we learned in school is we haven’t learned anything at all.
Jordie A Stewart
TMT Research Assistant