Life in the Jungle
The greatest invention humanity has ever composed was surely the internet. Not the nuclear bomb, nor manned flight, nor even the vaccine, but the promise of information at our fingertips. If Man is separated from the animals by his reason alone, then surely reason must guide us, and therefore to at least Google these various crises that seem to plague the American psyche. Where the tiger learns to hunt, our children are taught the sciences and maths. We spend fortunes enough to feed small villages just to send a single child to college. And yet, irrational fear is as much a prime mover in our day-to-day lives.
Consider the Ebola virus. A disease that has only killed 5,000 people in the past 30 years, only 2 of whom were American. It can be prevented by simply washing your hands and not playing with the feces of ebola victimes, and is probably a 2 on the "I should care about this" scale. And yet lately, we are all in an uproar about this new plague running rampant throughout America. Donald Trump and the Huffington Post are encouraging us to spend thousands of dollars in protecting ourselves and boycotting airplanes. Walking Dead comparisons are disturbingly common.
Now consider HIV. In the time it took Ebola to make it across the sea, 641,976 Americans have died, with 1.1 million still living with the symptoms. If that seems infinitely worse, imagine the common flu. Influenza kills 500,000 people on average every year, and has been doing so since humans knew how to sneeze. Sometimes, the flu virus gets a little smarter, and manages to claim a few million. This has already happened four times in the past century.
Why is this, I wonder? Where is this panic coming from? I cannot expect Donald Trump to read my Weebly blog, but I felt the need to just type down somewhere, anywhere, this plea for sanity in society. Human beings have, in so many ways, evolved very little in the past few thousand years. We still profit on each other's fears like tigers displaying their stripes to it's prey. We still misuse our resources like monkeys throwing feces at each other. And like the great elephant, we are still victims with just the faintest glimmer of who or what it is that is stalking us.
We have reached a point in history where the unknown still terrifies us, and though the myth of possession is no longer as popular, we are just as happy to embrace the notion of strange, inexplicable forces infecting us and bringing untold suffering while happily ignoring perfectly explainable threats that a far greater threat. HIV is just as active as the human imagination and nearly as deadly. This sort of behavior has existed since one caveman said to another, “Give me your share and you won’t be eaten by bears.”
Consider the Ebola virus. A disease that has only killed 5,000 people in the past 30 years, only 2 of whom were American. It can be prevented by simply washing your hands and not playing with the feces of ebola victimes, and is probably a 2 on the "I should care about this" scale. And yet lately, we are all in an uproar about this new plague running rampant throughout America. Donald Trump and the Huffington Post are encouraging us to spend thousands of dollars in protecting ourselves and boycotting airplanes. Walking Dead comparisons are disturbingly common.
Now consider HIV. In the time it took Ebola to make it across the sea, 641,976 Americans have died, with 1.1 million still living with the symptoms. If that seems infinitely worse, imagine the common flu. Influenza kills 500,000 people on average every year, and has been doing so since humans knew how to sneeze. Sometimes, the flu virus gets a little smarter, and manages to claim a few million. This has already happened four times in the past century.
Why is this, I wonder? Where is this panic coming from? I cannot expect Donald Trump to read my Weebly blog, but I felt the need to just type down somewhere, anywhere, this plea for sanity in society. Human beings have, in so many ways, evolved very little in the past few thousand years. We still profit on each other's fears like tigers displaying their stripes to it's prey. We still misuse our resources like monkeys throwing feces at each other. And like the great elephant, we are still victims with just the faintest glimmer of who or what it is that is stalking us.
We have reached a point in history where the unknown still terrifies us, and though the myth of possession is no longer as popular, we are just as happy to embrace the notion of strange, inexplicable forces infecting us and bringing untold suffering while happily ignoring perfectly explainable threats that a far greater threat. HIV is just as active as the human imagination and nearly as deadly. This sort of behavior has existed since one caveman said to another, “Give me your share and you won’t be eaten by bears.”