And the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I do not know!” he answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” “What have you done?” replied the LORD. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground….   Genesis 4:9-10

Yesterday government response to the covid-19 virus was reaching a media crescendo.  We drove north to Eagle River Wisconsin to spend the weekend with my wife’s cousin and his family.  Life is short and there is time enough for family no matter the media frenzy.  The talking heads on the screen fill the air with a static, making the scalp tingle like portent of a summer’s thunder storm.

‘The world/your world is coming to an end.  Hunker down!’

That may well be true.  Time will tell.

It is an irony that this virus, a new pathogen, so new that we know little, not enough to have a vaccine, or even a treatment.  It has traveled from a market in Wuhan, China to Europe, to our country in a few weeks.  Highly infectious, the virus has the potential to cripple a society if it cannot be slowed down.

A virus, a life form, not even a single cell in complexity has silently, invisibly traveled from corner to corner in our world even as we travel with little effort, great distances in a few hours.  The virus passes through customs silently.  It needs no visa.  It travels in a limousine to the finest accommodation with no concern about the cost of a room for the night, etc.   Just like some of us.  It is passed around by touch, a handshake, a hug, by the residue left on a glass, and then days later the symptoms begin to appear.  If you are older, and are already living with a chronic health issue, the virus rapidly may invade the lungs, and death is likely to follow — if you cannot receive treatment soon enough.

This is not a promising picture as I see it.  Nature, which we have relentlessly abused with our life-style expectations and extractive technologies has tapped all of us on the shoulder.  The bill is presented for immediate payment.  This is the invoice for our studied denial of the effect of our actions upon Nature, our climate catastrophe denial.  To generalize, humans have been abusers of Nature, “takers” without regard for the long term damage caused by our taking.  Our insistence upon fossil fuel usage has damaged, and is damaging the climate, warmed the oceans, yet we press on in our oblivion, focused upon our petty tit for tat conflicts while the planet burns.

It is also a bill for our governments penchant for making enemies of other nations with whom we have differences in trade.  Hostility, trade wars, trash talking gesticulation has been the order of the day.  Our president and his administration likes to dismiss allies, nations that otherwise would be collaborators as hostile, objects of our coercion.   What might the Chinese know about this contagion that they choose not to tell us?

Everything is not fucking Ok.

This amounts to criminal activity in its effects. Our children will recognize and say out loud what we are ashamed to name; that the crime is of enormous proportion, unlike any thing of which humanity has been guilty.  Yes exceeding those of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau. Nature dies at our collective hand.

There is no time, no room for self pity.  There is time to focus the fear and the anger toward the hard labor which lies ahead.  We have to conceive of a way of life that does not idealize affluence, not idealize accumulation of power at the expense of the powerless.  A way of life that does not make enemies, willy-nilly of others, living elsewhere who have their own goals, and survival needs.  We must ween ourselves, like a cocaine addict going “cold turkey” from an insane addiction to violence in order to “get what we want.”  There is a better way.

Has it not occurred to us that a moment of hesitation, before blurting out what I happen to feel in this moment,– might be a good idea?  After all, that person, those persons hearing this voice, whether one person or millions do not deserve to be manipulated, coerced, lied to, or violently impacted by my words.  The other, whether Chinese in Hong Kong, Italians sick with covid-19, or even a central American immigrant illegal, praying not to be discovered by ICE is my brother, and deserves nothing but kindness, whatever help I have to give.