Years ago at college, I met Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange and many other brilliant novels.
When his father arrived home from World War I, he found everyone in the house, except his infant son, the future author, dead from the flu epidemic of 1918.
That got me interested in the flu. But when I went to the library, I found literally acres of books on the First World War, and virtually nothing on the worst epidemic in American history. That seemed amazing, given that it killed vastly more people.
This was in the early nineteen seventies. Older people who had lived through the flu pretty much didn’t want to talk about it.
It was as if we had a form of self-protective, collective amnesia. While we wallow in the details of every war we’ve fought before and since, we mostly avoid thinking about the invisible, inhuman enemies who made war on us back then, and pretty successfully, too.
Why that is remains a mystery to me. Katharine Graham, the great publisher of the Washington Post, said that the mind has a self-protecting function that makes you forget how horrible some experiences, like childbirth and moving, really are.
Maybe the flu falls into that category. What is surprising to me, given the intense crowding and great mobility of populations today, is that the earth hasn’t been seized by another pandemic of even greater proportions. I hope it never is.
We do enough damage to our own species. Last night a lady named Rosa Parks died. Fifty years ago, she was the scientific experiment who helped inoculate our nation against the virus of segregation. We won that one, but there are many other ills to go.
A few years ago, Rosa Parks was robbed and beaten up by a young black man who her actions had helped set free.
Whatever happens with the avian flu, we remain, too often, our own worst enemies.
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