A "Darwinian Sensibility"

 


With Covid restrictions falling like autumn leaves, what awaits?

New York Times columnist, Charles M. Blow, reminds us that Covid-19, in one or more variants, is here to stay.


As Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, said last month: “If you look at the history of infectious diseases, we’ve only eradicated one infectious disease in man, and that’s smallpox. That’s not going to happen with this virus.”

Fauci said that what we should hope for is that Covid would eventually be reduced to a “low level” where it is “integrated into the broad range of infectious diseases that we experience.”

Covid is likely to be here to stay. 

...The urge, both political and social, to simply “get on with it,” is incredibly strong.

The number of lives taken by Covid in this country alone — north of 900,000 — is almost unfathomable. But, somehow the public has absorbed and reckoned with it in some way. We have taken on a Darwinian sensibility about it all, accepting it as sudden thinning of a herd, a form of natural selection. It is both sad and stunning.

Covid has made us reconsider everything, the meaning of home and work, the value of public space, the magnitude and immediacy of death, what it truly means to be a member of a society.

We are still finding the answers to those questions, but the America we knew ended in 2019. This is a new one, scarred, struggling to its feet, dogged by moral and philosophical questions that on one hand have revealed its cruelty and on the other have forced it into metamorphosis.

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