171. War and Pandemic 2

In four years of World War, from 1914-1918, over 5 million people were killed, 116,500 of them Americans. In basically two of those years, 1917-1918, some 50 million people world-wide, and 675,000 Americans, were killed by the Influenza. 

 

It’s true that the War and its aftermath—the celebration of the Armistice—coexisted with the Influenza, and that they intermingled, borrowed deaths and casualties from each other. Nevertheless, the differences in the numbers are shocking. 

 

But not as shocking as the photos and videos of bombed out cities in Ukraine, of apartment houses, hospitals, theaters, houses and neighborhoods reduced to eye-stopping rubble. Not as shocking as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Gallipoli,” books and movies that dramatized World War I. 

 

Wars have heroes and villains, display boldness and cowardice. Zelensky is a hero, Fauci is not.  Putin is a villain, the gaggle of anti-vaxxers and Covid minimizers pathetic, but not, in most minds, the embodiment of evil. And it’s true that in war one side’s heroes might be the other sides’ villains, but history often shines light that is bright enough for each side to discover its own heroes and villains after the war is done. 

 

War is history’s sharp turns, when new nations emerge—as they did after WW I—and new and sometimes surprising alliances grow—as those of the US and Japan, the US and Germany did after WW II. 

 

Disease is history’s slogs, the long hauls that depopulate and weaken peoples and nations, and allow others to emerge stronger. The patterns of changes that The Plague wrought on Europe, or the impacts of the Influenza on the post WW I World are fodder for academic treatises, but not clear enough to teach in the standard history texts. Rarely and only briefly best-sellers.

 

Our time is like this. We don’t know what the outcome of Russia’s war on Ukraine will have—but we already have our heroes and villains, with more to come. 

 

And we don’t know where Covid 19 will go, how it will seep across nations and continents, but do know that it already has stolen more lives than the last decades of regional wars. It’s heroes are quiet ones, dressed in lab coats and hospital smocks, but we are too busy embracing “normal” life’s return to pay them much mind. Their stories will eventually be told in books, but not best sellers. 

 

War will always top the best-seller charts.