Pandemica
A tale of what might come.
Hope it doesn't come true. Ninety percent of the World's population succumbs.
Conclusion
Mankind slowly came to peace with itself after one war, with the vaccine distributed across the globe. The populations were so diminished, the planet enjoyed a respite from this creature called man. The Earth restored herself from all the scars that humans had created, pollution, deforestation and all sorts of imbalances. Animals regained their former habitats and numbers. Vast expanses of land enjoyed their primitive fauna and flora again. Forests spread their wide expanses of green. Global warming reversed itself. The oceans revived with life. The air was fresh again.
I think that Mother Nature caused this pandemic to correct our juvenile delinquency, as if she loved us like a schoolmistress who finally had to punish her unruly brats with a chastisement they would never forget. We were out of control, constantly infighting, with our technologies and mindlessly greedy conglomerates raping the planet of every resource. We would surely have polluted our habitat past repair and doomed ourselves and every living creature to extinction in another few decades. We deserved the spanking.
And so, good mother that she was, far above us in understanding and power, she put a stop to our misconduct, our malfeasance, with a winnowing. She opened the lid to her ever-bubbling cauldron, a restless soup of nucleic acids and proteins, and out slipped the COVID. It swept through our populations like a harvester through a wheat field. It was Death with a scythe.
She taught us a lesson and put us back in our crib, hoping we’d learn from our mistakes, setting us back to a state when we were harmless and would have generations to think it over before we once again reached the primacy of numbers and technology to do harm.
She stripped us naked again, like the weak and wondering baby we were only ten thousand years ago, just learning how to walk again, to build villages, fish and farm and domesticate the beasts around us.
And I hope we learned her lesson, to tread gently on her soft and tender turf and replace what we took, let it replenish before we took more, a symbiosis, harmony and unity with our brother inhabitants of this house, the creatures she also created for a reason, as an example for us, as they all lived in an equilibrium that would continue as long as the sun.
In the following years I imagined I’d be happy contemplating life, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, pipe in hand, watching the youngsters grow into adults and their children likewise, thriving, enjoying and living off the bounty of the land. I knew I had one more book to write, a history with a moral lesson to it, the one we all experienced, the one that Mother Nature wrote wordlessly. She truly was our parent and guide in all things and especially kind to us, her favorite but wayward child, gifted with intelligence, invention, making us the pinnacle of her creations, able to change her world and rule over it, if we did so with the humanity and love that she also infused into our souls.
The End
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