THREAD
I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1918 influenza epidemic, as I’m sure many others have. Here is how I learned about it:

These are pages from THE GHOST IN THE BIG BRASS BED, part of a series of YA ghost stories by Bruce Coville. That book, c. 1991, was the only mention of the 1918 flu I ran across in my life until college at least. What Nine’s dad says here is so true -

We tend to teach stuff in school that displays our own capacity for inhumanity, not stuff that made a temporary, massive difference in life on earth but that taught us few lasting lessons. That’s part of why this pandemic feels so scary -

We haven’t dealt with anything like this in a century, for one, but when we did deal with it, we didn’t really learn a Big Human Lesson from it. It came and went and took so many lives without leaving us a teachable moment.

I fear the same thing will happen with COVID. Interesting human lessons abound here - how even minor collective action benefits us, about (for lack of a better way to put it briefly) socialism vs. capitalism, about what a failure of leadership wreaks on a nation.

But these all shrink to near-invisibility in the face of an enemy that does not care about us one way or the other, that is not cruel due to ideology or sociopathy but is simply acting like a virus acts. There’s no inherent lesson in a virus.

The lesson is in how we react to it. The choices we make, now and afterward.

What will we choose to do with the information we’ve gathered abt the fragility of the American lifestyle in late capitalism?

Maybe nothing. Coville had to write a novel to teach me abt the 1918 flu.

Will more than 20 million have to die for 2091’s children to learn about COVID in school? Or will we just bury our dead and forget the whole thing?