Our Microbiotic Masters

Some very worthwhile thoughts on the Pandemic, from Redneck Texan:

You know, life was never meant to be easy on Earth.

Dinosaurs though they were some badasses, but their path crossed paths with a rogue comet, and they yielded the path to the planet's future to more adaptable species.

Humans inherited the role of dominant species because because of our capacity for intelligence relative to the threats that surrounded humanity. When we cross path with most wild animals in the forest today, they dont run away from us because of our physical brawn, they run away because millennia of evolution has ingrained in them the fear of fuckin' with this big brained mammal hunter gatherer.

But once we started settling in large groups we came face to face with the real conquerors of the planet ....... mother nature's final word on who's really in charge here ...... our Microbiotic Masters.

Every time we would rise up, they would cut us back down to a more manageable size.

There have been dozens of recorded examples of our herd being thinned out, at times on the order of 80% of us in a given region.

We didn't conquer the new world with just our superior technology and our willingness to violently wield it at those resistant to our spread, we let the microbiotics we brought with us on our first globalization wave ravage the competitions immune system for us.

All the while we were basically ignorant to our master's presence amongst us. We historically blamed the massive pandemics on the Gods, Witches, and Jews.

Pandemics have changed the course of human societies on more than one occasion. Sometimes for the better. The Feudalistic system was broken on the altar of pandemic. The Lord's immune systems were no more advanced than that of the peasants. When your region's population is reduced to a fraction of what it was before, new real estate becomes available cheap, and your specialized labor has more value. Economic systems are born in the rubble, and we typically, eventually, move on to higher standards of living than before. And those that survived the last pandemic add another genome blueprint for our immune system to replicate for whenever the master calls again.

Our ancestors lived with the threat of early death around every corner. If it wasn't those pesky barbarians living in the woods raiding our shit, there was always a horrible disease ready to decimate our families. Most of them lived with some form of pain that would be treatable today. Constant Intoxication helped mitigate that.

But that big brain did start to grasp the relationship between pestilence and hygiene and overabundance of rodents or the other trappings of our unsanitary sewer systems of the time period.

Connections were made, and eventually we even advanced to the point we could start to see the faces of our masters in our technological marvels. But even in the 20th century, despite all our experiences, advancements in understanding, and best practices ..... our gains were mitigated by our co-advancements in transportation.

While lack of transportation once limited pandemics to regions, or took centuries to migrate across continents, by the 14th century Black Plague found its way from China to Europe in a few years and thinned our herd by 25% along the way, The Spanish Flu made the same trip in a couple months and took about a 27% toll on the good guys.

Now we've had a nice long run of increased standards of living and medical breakthroughs, complacencies have had time to become institutionalized, freeing us to worry more about political leaderships and recreational venues, than the lurking inevitability of another visit from the Master, and time enough for the vast majority of us to forget how to survive without the trappings of commerce and the general willingness to obey the rule of law.

So here we are ...... Waiting for our Political and Scientific class to give us the all clear. Altering our gathering habits is easy enough, especially for those of us naturally inclined towards isolation, but it all hinges on supermarket shelves remaining stocked, and preferably being able to acquire life's necessities with money instead of contests of personal violence. For those of us that don't live on self-sustaining farms or communes, there could become a point that money wont buy you survival.

We're not there yet, and I really dont think we are going to cross that Rubicon this time. There are some early signs of panic buying, but everyone's belly is still full.

So, it boils down to a race between our advanced medical establishment decoding the latest message from our master's deadly hand, and our Farmer's and Manufacturers ability to continue to meet the needs of our technologically dependent, soft by historical standards, but as violently capable on an empty stomach as our ancestors were, society.

The next few weeks should settle the masses..... or fundamentally alter our way of life if it does not. Once reliable data can more accurately project outcomes, and the increasing tales of hopefully unscarred recovered survivors allow us to get back to moving up one more rung of the evolutionary ladder.

But this experience, that will connect us to our ancestors fears, gives us a taste of what living with the fear and suspicion were like for those that forged our current comfortable existence. This unprecedented shared experience will leave us changed. Hopefully for life. Hopefully for the better.