31. Gut punched--or not

I don’t remember grade school or high school lessons about the impact of measles and smallpox on the Native Americans when the first Europeans arrived. I remember the picture of Squanto, the corn, beans, and pumpkins, but the stories after that were all about Indians hunting and gathering, not farming. Columbus “discovered” America, Cortez conquered Mexico, and Pizarro the Incas. 

My college textbook for the required “Western Civilization” class—which I still have—gives only a few sentences to the plague of the Middle Ages, an epidemic disease that killed a third of Europe’s population. 

I don’t remember learning that The Great Warming—950-1250—had anything to do with the Vikings settling Iceland and Greenland, or that the Little Ice Age—1300-1850—froze Greenland and its settlers in, and contributed to starvation in the British Isles and sent indentured servants to America.

History isn’t about weather and sickness, but about discoverers, kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, generals and admirals…  Or was. 

But we are living in the middle of two incredible world events—global warming and a Pandemic—that are impacting the actions of presidents and prime ministers, popularly elected politicians and dictators, and the lives of people and families across the world. 

In her book on the Spanish Flu of 1918, Laura Spinny reminds that there are no monuments in London or Washington D.C. to that pandemic, that “Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively… as millions of discrete, private tragedies.” 

It strikes me that climate change and the current pandemic are such individual tragedies. If your island is sinking into the sea or your reindeer are dying, if you are a doctor in New York City or a member of the Navajo Nation, your world is crashing. 

The rest of us live in New Jersey or Idaho, wear masks or we don’t, eat out or not, watch the Johns Hopkins numbers of sick and the dead climb, and watch videos of melting icebergs. 

As surely as the plague or the Little Ice Age, these things affect us all; but we find it hard to come together with coherent attacks on things that haven’t gut-punched us personally. We’d better learn to.

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