We live in times of exaltation of nature.
The environmental and climatic escabechinas that human voracity produces and a model of progress based on perpetual growth persuade more and more people to look back, to remote and legendary times when
Homo sapiens
and the planet that gave birth to them they coexisted in peace and harmony in a perfect earthly paradise.
The “natural” label and its cohorts — bio, eco, organic, macrobiotic,
detox
- has become a winning marketing strategy, despite the fact that no one really knows what those pompous adjectives mean.
Our only escape, the new pantheistic theologians argue, is to return to that primal and pristine state of intimate connection with Mother Earth.
But nature has also given us covid-19, a poisoned gift that, for once, we had not deserved.
Special: One million dead
In less than nine months, the covid-19 pandemic has reached a symbolic death toll in the world that will continue to grow as long as science does not find an effective vaccine
Steven Pinker used to say that the most pernicious of psychopaths can murder 10 or 20 people, but that to kill a million psychopathy is not enough: you also need ideology.
He was referring to Hitler and Stalin, two undiagnosed murderous psychopaths.
But this time we didn't need Pinker's recipe to kill a million people.
We have had enough with SARS-CoV-2, the latest poisonous invention of Mother Nature "red tooth and claw", according to the stark description of Tennyson.
It was also nature, the God of the pantheists, who created the plague, smallpox, Spanish flu, AIDS, and genetic diseases, to name other striking examples.
And the only tool we have against covid-19 is entirely an artifice of human ingenuity, science.
The reality does not conform to theological doctrines.
One million dead.
It is said soon.
Just a few months ago, those people lived their lives burdened by arthritis, mortgage, or unemployment, perhaps afflicted by a meaningless biography, perhaps content with their privileges, euphoric, or desperate.
What few expected is that a virus would kill them, a mere handful of atoms without religion or ideology, an almost nothing that only exists for the mere fact that it can exist, that physics and biology make it possible, and that despite everything has killed a million people with a marvelous and disturbing efficiency.
It looks awesome.
And just that, not to believe it, was what almost everyone did in December, and in January, and in February, and well into March.
I say "almost everyone" because virologists, epidemiologists, and other specialized scientists have been warning us for decades that this, or something very similar to this, was going to happen sooner rather than later.
It is true that no one could know the exact date, or the specific virus that would cause the next pandemic.
The main suspect, in fact, was not a coronavirus, but a flu virus, and there were good reasons for that.
The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 50 million people - more than the Great War that ended that same year - and there were two other flu pandemics in the 20th century, although not as serious.
The slaughterer turned out to be a coronavirus, a cousin of the 2002 SARS (now renamed SARS-CoV-1), which was 10 times more deadly than the current SARS-CoV-2, but spread much less.
Few politicians who were in office in January 2020 should remember that event of 18 years ago, let's not talk about the Spanish flu of 1918, because the fact is that Western governments did not take for granted the alerts emanating from Wuhan , China, silenced at first by Beijing but soon backed by the World Health Organization (WHO).
When Italy was already affected to the bar, in Brussels they continued to discuss 5G and the ethics of social networks.
Governments, including the Spanish, began by minimizing the risks for the West, threw the Chinese experience into the drawer of irrelevant issues and locked it up.
Shortly thereafter, the huge mistake that had been was revealed.
An error so great that it can be measured in human lives.
"We have had to endure some embarrassing, impertinent and tiresome shows offered by our rulers"
Politicians may sometimes learn that their job is to serve the citizens.
So far they have only learned to say that, not to do it.
We have had to endure these months some embarrassing, impertinent and tiresome shows offered by our leaders, diatribes so out of tune that it takes two seconds of listening to turn off the screen.
Separate mention deserves the stupidity of the two most stubborn nationalisms in the country, the Catalan and the Madrid, who would see their public health systems collapse before admitting that they need the help of the Government and the rest of the autonomous communities.
His lies blush purely obvious, except for his acolytes who live locked up in the echo chamber where they only hear what they want to hear.
Looking at other countries does not improve the picture much.
Vaccine nationalism is also a pity, whereby every piece of the world fights for its doses with earmuffs so thick that they prevent them from seeing even their closest neighbors.
The anti-vaccines, conscientiously misinformed by shamans and scammers, are embarrassing, and who at this rate will constitute a serious obstacle to immunization campaigns.
Leaders who brag about the might of their public health while cutting back and juggling it are pitiful.
But a million people have died and, for the moment, our grief must be reserved for them.
What a massacre.
How awful.
Information about the coronavirus
- Here you can follow the last hour on the evolution of the pandemic
- This is how the coronavirus curve evolves in Spain and in each autonomy
- Download the tracking application for Spain
- Search engine: The new normal by municipalities
- Guide to action against the disease
