Silence rules the viral world.
Moving unseen without conscience or ego, virus molecules travel for free, carrying their genes courtesy of living hosts, hitching rides and traveling with the reckless abandon of a murderous outlaw motorcycle gang on a vicious holiday run. Every viral day’s a celebration rolled into a horde of fatty protein globules run amok with killer intent.
Except nobody’s having fun but the bug.
For mankind, the virus schedules tearful wakes before increasingly quiet mass funerals.
Fifty thousand today.
A hundred thousand tomorrow?
Infected people die quietly, like Boo Boo, society’s lonely prisoner gone to a pauper’s grave in a field adjacent to a state penitentiary. Wrapped in a soiled sheet, government bureaucrats committed his remains to the earth, a sacred, yet damaged, world that holds the sweet mysteries of life and death.
Mother Nature controls our cycle of being, standing mute as the guard of existence until, with all the power and glory of her unbleached mood, she heralds the deadly news as a headline on the obituary pages of time.
Bugout!
Bugout!
Read all about it!
Not so long ago, American soldiers in Korea used that phrase to name the human desire to flee war’s horrible grip. Young men lost their minds under the pressure of killing and mass destruction. Even the courageous sometimes bugged out, running screaming from reality as if they could truly escape. Earlier battles called this frantic experience shell shock. Later killing fields christened the flight Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD that made otherwise strong men and women weak.
Whatever you call this mortal desperation, nothing compares to the infectious disease strain Mother Nature unleashes when she tires of human excess. When future generations record early 21st Century history, assuming the human species as we know it survives, they might dismiss our 2020 global pandemic as the result of sheer stupidity. They might scoff at the fateful plague that claimed their ancestors.
They might say we just bugged out.
Pioneers in a new society so very different from the old, they will hopefully take heed and do what they can to keep this and other viruses at bay. Keeping social distance from a pattern of self-absorbed ignorance, they will hopefully embrace science and technology for the greater good. Bravely entering the new world, they will do for, not onto, others. Or, unless their advanced civilization stops its hurtful ways, they, too, will die.
Our current greed knows no bounds.
Absolution escapes us.
Pay attention to Earth Day’s revenge. Climate change is real. If we fail to exercise caution and act responsibly, other species will survive and thrive, taking our place on the planet as the inheritors of the earth.
Summertime bats will swoop and play in the midnight air of August, cocking little brown heads and pricking tinier ears to sonar messages from beyond. Fat bumblebees will hover, sucking nectar from sweet-smelling flowers that remind the living how spring returns despite the terror virus, no matter the degree of privilege the human corpse once enjoyed.
In the wake of Mother Nature’s wrath, her magic will again prevail until it doesn’t and another virus returns. Picking up speed again and again, moving with deadly stealth onto the battlefield, the bug threatens to lay waste to innocent and guilty alike, those who respect and those who defile its ancient nature.
Pain parallels pestilence.
Bugout!
Apathy feeds its hungry wrath.
Bugout!
Insolence invigorates its growing spirit.
Bugout!
Humanity is not as powerful as people believe. Creation provided our natural environment a miraculous gift that evolves with judgment. Instead of tending to our riches wisely, we poison life’s vital seeds. Devolution is on us, killing our essence. Will we endure?
Or will we just Bugout!