63. Guns, Germs, and Steel

Day 14—My final day of quarantine

 

What a privilege, midst the pandemic and worry about upcoming holiday spread, to have time and space to think and write. Yesterday, a major worry slowed when granddaughter Oriana decided not to come home from Portland for Thanksgiving. It was a heartbreaker—and a heart-saver.

 

The election over, the disease has swelled across the headlines. I read and worry about Tribal people in the Dakotas and the Southwest, and admire the work they and others are doing to slow the pandemic. I cannot fathom Texas and South Dakota governors and their insistence on their own version of normalcy. Is it a comment on our times that studies showing that bars and social gatherings can be super spreaders while schools are not are routinely ignored? 

 

There’s at least some hope that history will save a bigger place for this pandemic than it has given to past outbreaks. My history classes, from elementary school through college, had little room for them. I remember something of the 14^th century Plague, but it was a footnote; I had no notion that it killed a third of Europe’s people. 

 

In early grades we learned Columbus and Washington and Jefferson—and maybe Squanto and Pocahontus—and when thought old enough to understand, Lincoln and the end of slavery. No one knew—or dared say—that diseases had killed 80 or 90 percent of the Native Americans. I’ve only learned details of the 1918 Influenza that killed 600,000 Americans this year, in he shadow of Covid-19.

 

My “long reading” these 14 days has been a rereading of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond sets out to explain why European civilizations were so successful—dominant—in the world, while other civilizations on other continents rose and fell, but never attained the global influence and power that those on the Eurasian continent have gained and still hold. Guns and steel have played their roles, but germs have often been the deciders. Most importantly, European diseases—smallpox, measles, typhoid and others—devastated American Indians and the civilizations they had grown. 

 

Pandemics don’t promote heroes and statues, and their deaths can’t be made into romance. They brought us witches and trials, strange religious practices, and the trick of hiding historically behind wars and conquests. 

 

This exercise is my own modest attempt to remember this one.

 

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