The long tail of Covid-19 continues to coil around the throat of Western civilization, growing ever tighter, compressing the chest and stomach of society, inducing ever more and more death from heart attacks and strokes. We are witness to a spectacle observed very rarely in human history, that of the beginning of near-total collapse of civilization brought upon by novel virus. Once upon a time, smallpox spread across the continents of North and South America, bringing to the ground where the bodies were conveniently buried over in shallow graves the cultures and civilizations of North and South America. The colonizers were free to run roughshod over the ever decreasing survivors as though what had happened and what was still happening was not just inevitable but just in some form. The people of the West were anointed to spread across the landmass. It was destiny manifest. The lands were cleared with very little war and hardly any risk for the invaders. The greatest risk was encroaching too quickly, and having the virus return to settler society, and do to white folk what it'd done to the red people.
What irony it is to witness this in real time now. How it must've seemed to the First Nations of yesteryear when the virus first made its way through the villages, striking down at random people both within these societies and peripheral but the numbers at first were never too alarming. Perhaps 300 out of 30 thousand altogether. It was terrible, and the loss was likely felt but all the rest survived. At first anyway. It returned again and again, and again and again. Perhaps it wasn't smallpox but instead tuberculosis or cholera. Or any disease that was brought to North American shores by the interlopers. As these waves of novel viruses spread, people died, or were damaged, and villages were torn asunder, and what seemed a land bereft of people opened up to the interlopers because eventually it truly was a peopless land, and it seemed a godsend but it was really the work of the white man's devils.
We witness this again, in real time. Instead, this time, it is one virus at first that has a habit of evolving at a fairly rapid clip. It is not two or three different viruses but just the one, in many, many disguises. And it sneaks through the population, quietly and quickly, and what seems sudden is the onslaught of people sickened well after the fact they'd become contagious. And in its duplicity, it allows for other viruses to run rampant, and an effect not unlike that of smallpox and tuberculosis running freely through North America has Covid-19 allowed for colds and flu and RSV and staph and so forth to perpetuate, sicken, damage, and even kill their victims when before they would have been barely noticeable at all.
Society, as a whole, does nothing halt this. The virus spreads, and other illnesses follow. Illness and disability and death follow, but still leadership pretends and extends that nothing is amiss. There isn't even a formal conspiracy, just a "confluence of interests" as George Carlin put it. And these interests are simply to pretend as though the economy is doing great! Morning in America continues to this day! And ignore the coughing and the coffins, and the collapse of workforces and hospitals because money must be made. However, make sure to forget that money is made from profit, and profit is created by labour, because not to do so would be to invite intrusive thoughts such as, how long is this even sustainable? At what point do we look beneath our feet, and see no ground, and begin to fall, ala the ol' Wile E. Coyote moment that we know is coming?
From this point on, there are two choices. Continue onward as though nothing is wrong, and then suddenly some day down the line, society seizes up from something like a heart attack or stroke. Something on a macro scale able to stop the economy wholly. Or we could reintroduce mitigations to slow Covid-19's spread, and hopefully stop it sooner rather than later. But it's important to stop Covid-19 entirely. It's vital to get to Covid-0 by whatever means are available to us, whether that's just waiting it out by keeping people home, and having them mask up when going out. Or by introducing and enforcing workplace and retail and restaurant mandates to "clear the air" by having them properly filtrate the air with purifiers and filters. Or some combination thereof. It can be done, and has been done. It just takes time, and some sacrifice of profits.
However, as it is right now, confluence of interests are working to ensure profits are chosen over people, and that Covid-19 is free to infect. But sooner or later, and suddenly, will Covid rob society of both people and profit.
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