The Cautionary Tale, Part 2
CAUTION BEFORE THE CAUTION
This is a cautionary tale attached to and inseparable from other cautionary tales. “It would be fair,” I was told – by an authority I’ll share if you keep reading - to give a “caution-before-the-caution.” Here it is:
If you imagine yourself my friend or part of my inner circle, read this entire series before engaging me about any of it. And then, think twice. I’m sharing these things here for many reasons – including to protect you from direct, unfiltered expression of what lies beneath. Discard that protection at your peril.
Trigger warnings aplenty: This series is going to include material around mortality, empathy, morality, disability, science. It will include references to fascism – and its ugly eugenics handmaiden. It’s going to directly address – in very unvarnished terms - character, humanity, and the lack thereof. Also, moulting.
ANOTHER GAME; ANOTHER LIFE
May 15th ...
Morning: I’m starting to feel pretty crappy. I’ve got a second negative COVID test. But I’ve got a fever, and I’m badly brain fogged. I vacate the house, preparing to isolate in case I’m positive. Best to sort myself now, in case this gets bad later.
Afternoon: Trish brings a fresh test, which quickly shows positive.
We’ve lived in near-isolation for over 5 years. Diligent N95 masking, hand washing, skipping dental and medical care to avoid the the malpracticing medical workers spreading COVID. We knew that being forced into a medical environment would be the Achilles heel. And, so it was. Trish’s exposure to me means she can no longer care for her terribly ill mother in what may be her last days. It’s crushing.
I swallow my first dose of Paxlovid.
Evening: Fever. Chills. Aches. I feel like someone threw a hot wet blanket over my head, but the rest of me is cold. I feel super weak, but can’t stop pacing - marching, really. Most sickness makes me want to sit, disappear, isolate. This one is making me weirdly chatty.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35137368/
I’m drinking water constantly, but the unquenchable cotton mouth remains. I struggle through the brain fog to have some difficult conversations with Trish about possible outcomes. It’s much harder for having to do it over an intercom. During the night, she comes out to peer into the van – to see if I’m still breathing.
May 16th ...
Morning: That was a hard night. Kept waking myself up blathering nonsense in my sleep. High-fever delirium. Another cordial visit with Death over another game of checkers. Or, was it the same one? We both keep making moves, but I can’t remember a game finishing.
I move from eating and medication to bathroom and back to the hammock, sleeping most of the time. No energy for anything else. At least Trish is still testing negative.
Evening: Fever hitting hard again. Body aches are fierce. The cough is bad, though I’ve had worse. My oxygen saturation is dropping into the 80’s. The exhaustion and fever blur the line between wake and sleep.
A field of grain, stalks straight and uniform like soldiers. The sound of a scythe striking. Proud, perfect stalks falling in unison.
“... and the meek shall inherit ….” Then a rattle.
Is my cough waking me up again?
But, it’s not me.
Wait. I recognize that laugh.
“Diversity” Death said, as my eyes struggled to focus. “The short, the bent, the late sprouts. Inheritance is not by virtue but deviance. Diversity is what prevents a harvest from being an end.” Gesturing toward me, “Even your virus endures this way – with the second-greatest friction to my work.” The statement punctuated by jumping one of my checkers.
It’s true: As more people gained partial resistance through vaccination or surviving infection, the original version of COVID faded. But, mitigations like isolation and masking were done in half-measures, allowing the virus to take refuge, often in immune-suppressed individuals. There, it lingered, reorganized, and spun-off variation after variation, finding its way through our defenses like a hacker brute-forcing every possible password. The version called “Omicron” was NINETY PERCENT (90%) more infectious than the original. “You-do-you” individualism didn’t just abandon the immune-compromised; it turned them into living, walking, coughing, gain-of-function laboratories. And distribution machines.
“It’s your move.”
I tried to focus on the board. “Wait. Second-strongest?” I asked.
“Accidental diversity was the first great ... impediment ... to reaping whole populations in one stroke. Organized diversity – cooperation - is far stronger. Compassion for the weaker, the lesser, the odd - broadens the genetic base, so one stroke doesn’t harvest all.”
I move a checker. And, again, my fever-fogged mind drifted. To a winter scene. Tracks of a young deer in her first snow. The tracks are crooked. And bloody.
I know these tracks. I know this deer. She was born here, right out back. I watched her nurse and frolic. Heard her cry for her mother.
Her right hind leg is suddenly 6 inches too short - jagged bone jutting, blood trailing in the snow. Distressed and confused, she can’t walk right. I’m grief-stricken at such a fate for such a beautiful youngster. I doubt she’ll live more than a few horrible days. She’ll never see Winter in full robes, let alone the glory of Spring.
There’s a story - of a student asking Margaret Mead about the first sign of civilization. Her answer, they say, was about a fossil of a fractured human femur that had healed. A human with a broken femur can’t hunt, gather, or fend off predators. A healed femur is evidence of humans caring for their injured. She said, “Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.”
“And all human progress,” my companion-in-checkers offered.
“What?” I asked.
“Do you think progress comes from ‘job creators’?” That rattling-bones laughter again. “Do you think it was the fastest hunter that invented the bow? The Greeks noticed how progress often springs from those whose oddness, injury, or age might have called me to work - if not for the caring of others. Portraying Hephaestus as lame reminds those who aren’t too dull to notice. When a society abandons people, it abandons all that’s been invested in them … and all they might ever contribute.” Death moves a game piece without looking up. “The ones some call weak, or ‘the vulnerable’ often carry what the strong can’t even imagine needing ... Until they do. It’s your move.”
I try to study the checkerboard through blurry vision. I think of the autistic child who sees patterns others miss. I think of the anxious person who notices dangers others ignore. I think of the physically fragile developing extraordinary mental resilience. I think of the person whose brain works differently, reaching solutions others can’t.
I move a piece, remarking, “Someone said they preferred sympathy to empathy - called empathy a made-up new-age word – claimed it harmed society.”
I don’t know if the reaction was a different flavor of laugh, or something else. The sound was like a pile of dry, dead branches snapping underfoot. Then: “Sympathy is observing pain from a comfortable distance. Empathy is feeling the pain also inside oneself.”A pause to capture two of my pieces, before finishing. “But, that requires courage.”
Scientists gave rats a choice between rescuing a drowning cage-mate – or getting a chocolate treat.
The rats chose rescuing. And, those who had been in the drowning pool before were quicker to act. “Not only does the rat recognize distress, but he is even more moved to act because he remembers being in that situation,” said Peggy Mason, neurobiologist at the University of Chicago.
Even if rats just prefer companionship to chocolate, they’d still be more enlightened and socially competent than humans who won’t mask to slow a pandemic that’s killing and disabling them all – especially their children.
Emotional contagion sparks the impulse of cooperation through which all social species expand their greatest resistance to extinction - genetic maneuverability, achieved through diversity. They do this by fostering the survival of those not ideally suited to this fleeting moment of evolutionary time.
But humans have built a culture drowning in main character syndrome. This individualism isn’t freedom, but a behavioral sink eclipsing the impulse most responsible for their survival. “You do you” is killing grandmas, and brain damaging an entire generation of children.
I recall someone saying they “need to feel normal - to do “normal things” (things that spread COVID - like restaurants and bars, and going to concerts unmasked).
In the middle of an airborne plague that has killed millions and disabled millions more - and that’s still ongoing. Awash in a rising tsunami of disability. The middle of the largest technological upheaval in history. The largest transfer of wealth from struggling workers to the already-obscenely-wealthy. Accelerated upending of climate on a planetary scale. The middle of the largest mass extinction in several millennia. The precipice of planetary famine.
Anyone who “feels normal” right now is unhinged.
Anyone who thinks they should “feel normal” is delusional.
Pretending “normal” is complicity in mass harm.
Frustrated trying to find a good move, I look up. “People keep saying they need to feel normal - asking ‘When will things be normal?’”
“Things ARE normal ... for this point in time. What things will never again be is the past. Time moves in one direction only ... at least for the living ... It’s still your move.”
I think about “normal” as a social construct fabricated by the majority - or people good at pretending to be. The geocentric model of the universe was “normal,” even compulsory, though totally wrong. Slavery was “normal,” and law, though morally indefensible.
Humans normalize factually wrong things and atrocities whenever it suits those in power. But, the bill for the fantasy always comes due. It’s ironic that the narcissists sniveling about how they need to do normal things would be able to do normal things - and permit others to do normal things - without getting sick or killing others - if they would simply participate in collective protection.
I think about people who have called me “friend” but whose atrocious selfishness is part of why I’m sick. They have progressively forced the medically compromised - and the science literate - into increasing isolation. They often then mock those they have harmed. Their excuses, justifications - and a droning chant of denials and lies - are disgusting clots of moral disengagement.
Death captures another of my pieces, remarking, “People abandon the sick, the dying, the poor because it’s unbearable to face their own selfishness ... or vulnerability.”
The word “unbearable” seems to echo....
“The weak will fall by the wayside” — the dismissiveness isn’t just cruelty, it’s groundwork to manufacture consent for eugenics, and worse. Hannah Arendt warned, “The death of human empathy is among the earliest signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism”. The Nazis demonstrated exactly that trajectory, using calculated dismissal, willful neglect, and deliberate spread of disease for a campaign they called “racial hygiene.”
Eugenical thinking isn’t just monstrous, but a failure on its own terms. In Ireland, thirty years of potato mono-culture eliminated forty-five varieties of potato - and a million people. The fossil record shows that whatever is optimal in one evolutionary moment is unfit for a future one: Genetic funnels are species death traps.
Arrogant eugenicists would have eliminated the likes of Alan Turing, Beethoven, or Franklin Roosevelt. Diversity isn’t “woke ideology”: It’s extinction insurance - applied science at the seventh-grade level. Those who promote or accept eugenical ideas aren’t just enemies of social humanity but of the human species itself, hacking at genetic branches that bear innovation, possibly survival.
Spread of disease and abandonment of infection control – especially by the medical establishment – are today excused through eugenical rhetoric. This is an intentional de-diversification our genetic portfolio. At precisely the moment the planet faces massive climate and biological upheaval. They are herding humanity into a genetic funnel of death: An entire species marching toward the single reaping, the great filter, the endless fossil nap. That is the cost of forgetting – or abandoning – the evolutionary gifts of empathy and compassion.
A summertime scene. A tiny spotted fawn tentatively emerges from the thicket in the corner of the yard.
In a moment, the mother doe arrives, limping ...
By my count, this is the sixth spring the doe we call “Tripod” has brought her own fawns into our world - often twins.
Fate took one of her legs, but the herd preserved her life, gaining a good mother who gave back strong sons and daughters. And, became a fierce and intelligent matriarch. It’s really something to see her stop, look both ways, and wait before crossing the busy street – and to watch others following her wise lead.
Death moves a piece. “Rats. Dolphins. Elephants. Humpback whales - and your tripod friend. They’ve been living the lesson for a long time – without forgetting it. The trouble with people is they don’t know what side they’re on .... Most don’t even know what sides there are …”
<BOOM> I’m jolted awake by a pair of F-15 eagles barely a few thousand feet overhead, all four engines throttling up as they climb into their morning sortie.*
It must be 9:30 already. Time for my meds anyway.