Covid is inferior when we unite

Hello Tom Cruise 94, welcome to the Scribes.

A lot of people are really struggling right now, both from the disease and loss, and from the lockdowns. These are hard times but I appreciate the need to be upbeat about beating this.

Some people have turned to novels and writing to help with these times. Have you been working anything?

 

I appreciate the difficult times, and how much politics impacts what is going on in the world with respect to this virus (as with so many things). Let's not forget the forum rules with regarding to discussions of contemporary politics. Those discussions often lead to rancor that is never desirable, and given what is going on in the world, I'd argue rancor and division is less desirable now than before. Thanks, all.

 

One doesn't see evidence of dealing with the Black Death couched in political terms, either in the 14thc or in later recurrences. There's a touch of that with syphilis, with the English calling it the French Disease while others called it the Spanish Disease, but that was as much cultural as nationalistic prejudice. Nowhere do we find war rhetoric. That's strictly modern and rather depends on the existence of the modern nation-state.

Conversely, one also does not find people in the 14thc talking about unity or communities working together or any of that. It was all couched in religious terms. Priests were sometimes severely criticized for failing in their priestly duties--not giving communion or doing proper services at burial. Urban governments did take action, including forced quarantines (the term comes from Venice), but nothing was done at the level of kings, except for the time-honored tradition of nobles high-tailing it for the countryside when things got grim.

We are, to put it succinctly, creatures of our times.