What the hell does corona want?
A virus doesn’t have a will but does it have a purpose? Is it just trying to kill us for fun? No, it has no concept, let alone a concept of fun. It just is. But its being sure seems like a puzzle piece fitting into some odd-shaped gap in the jigsaw puzzle of Man.
Does it want us to not have a population of 7 billion? It certainly seems to thrive on our overrunning the surface of the planet so that we’re within sneezing distance of one another so often. No, it doesn’t have a will and doesn’t care about overpopulation.
Does it want us to stop traveling from continent to continent, in hours, in sealed aluminum canisters where we rebreathe each others breath? No, it doesn’t have a will and doesn’t hate the airline industry (any more than 7 billion of us do).
Does it want us to stop living— as too many do — from minute to minute on our last dollar, in the biggest car we can afford, with the biggest house and the smallest rainy day fund? No, it doesn’t have a will and has nothing against suburbia or financial engineering or Wall Street or Main street.
Does it want us to stop insulating the earth with greenhouse gasses or stop the oceans from rising or the trash from piling up in the Pacific Ocean, or the Earth’s species from being decimated? No, it doesn’t have a will and it’s no nature lover… just nature itself in its rawest form.
It doesn’t want any of these things but they sure seem to make it happy and fuel its spread. It is simply the rawest expression of our innermost working, DNA, the miracle that makes all life possible. It is the miracle. It is life, despite the scientists telling us that it isn’t technically so, since it can’t survive on its own.
Is it wrong to wish that coronavirus would go away, or die? Yes and no. I suppose that’s my point. We will probably quash it… the alternative being the unlikely prospect of it killing all mankind. History tells us it doesn’t work that way. But we would be better off …
respecting it and learning what we’re doing wrong
rather than
what it might be doing evil.
Its cousins are out there by the gazillions, hiding, mutating, plotting, and patiently waiting. Pray that one does not flower who has the infectivity of his brethren covid, but the ugliness of ebola, turning its victims bodies inside-out in minutes once it overtakes. Worry about that, not covid. Worry about how WE will behave differently, better, faster.
