History doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes

[File this one under “History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme” - Mark Twain (attributed)]

Yesterday, I was reading along in a book called The Intellectual Devotional ¹. The book is 365 Daily devotionals that are split across the “seven fields of knowledge” (History, Literature, Visual Arts, Science, Music, Philosophy, & Religion). In any event, I found myself in Week 12, Monday (which is History). The topic was “The Black Plague”. The bare facts: Originated in Asia. Spread like wildfire across the globe. Active in Europe 1347-1350. Killed one-third of the European population. The graphic above depicts Florence in 1348.

“The consequences of the plague in European society were profound. Many enraged European Christians blamed Jews for the disease, and the pogroms that followed the Black Death were among the worst outbreaks of anti-Semitism in history.” (Kidder & Oppenheim, 2006, p. 78)

In the United States, COVID-19 has claimed more than five hundred thousand lives, there is currently a vaccine in wide distribution. The advancement of science and scientific understanding in 660 years has been astounding. As each day goes by, another raft of chronic symptoms emerges that are tied to COVID-19 infection. So, folks, the respiratory consequences may not kill you, but your body may be compromised in a number of other ways.

The current President refers to his predecessor as “The Former Guy”. The Former Guy had the same influence and power to stop the spread, but seemed more interested in keeping the stock market up. Enforcing a full quarantine was possible (New Zealand did it, and shut the transmission down cold) but businesses would have had to shut down, and the financial markets would have suffered. As a result of not shutting down, the US had the highest infection rates, and has far more deaths than other countries that have much larger populations. And to top it off, he downplayed the whole thing, even making this virus a punchline.

And I believe his repeated use of the phrase “Kung Flu” - to describe where the virus came from - has contributed to the uptick in violence directed at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). Add this to the already prevalent number of hate crimes being perpetrated against blacks, and now things are getting really out of hand.

White Americans seem to use violence as a language to assert dominance over populations they find abhorrent. The ready supply and availability of guns doesn’t make things any easier. I blocked a friend on Facebook yesterday for posting some really abhorrent shit about the nature of the Holocaust, and the relative lack of guns among the victim class.

It doesn’t matter if Mark Twain said it, it still seems true that “History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme”

Last: People are people. As Maya Angelou put it in “Human Family”, “We are more alike, my friends than we are unalike.”

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