Weekly Column
We Are Not the Virus. We Are the Kamikazes.
Covid-19 may be our final, last-gasp revolt
I understand why environmentalists have concluded that Covid-19 is nature’s way of repelling human activity. If we’re going to keep mucking around with Earth’s biodiversity, climate, topsoil, oceans, and air, eventually nature’s going to respond. In this view, the virus is nature’s own antibodies, repelling human invasion.
I sympathize with the systemic style of this perspective, but I think they’re looking at it the wrong way. No, we are not being attacked by nature for our sins — but this is a shared, collective illness. Covid-19 is an opportunistic infection, attacking the human organism as a whole.
I don’t look at it as a good thing — not at all — but it reminds me of how we get sick as individuals in real life. We get run down from too much work and stress. We don’t take any downtime for family and friends. We don’t have enough laughter in our lives. Or we do shift work, alternating days and nights with little regard for our biological clocks. We start drinking coffee or taking speed to keep going and then more medicine to deal with the depression.
We get the warnings: bad sleep, bad moods, and bad sex. We experience less satisfaction in general; our relationships…
