We're All Gonna Die Someday Lord, We're All Gonna Die Someday

Culling the Herd

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.

I 

I look at disease as nature's way of culling the 

herd.  Bad genetics, of which I have no dearth, tend to help sort things out.  I saw yesterday that due to environmental contamination, caused by human activity, fertility rates are crashing, another genetic culling.  This isn't social darwinism, but actual natural selection (aided by our hubris and inability to stop destroying the place we live) doing its work.  Of course, poor people and therefore, generally, non-white people in the West suffer the most--since race and economics closely track. That isn't Darwinism at work, but racism, by the way. Any other answer is unsatisfactory as an explanation, and likely contains bedded racist assumptions. Enough about that.

The more we try to architect around it, the more ways nature shows it's inescapability, underscores our hubris.  We build vaccines and embrace the germ theory of disease, and the world population balloons. But in the background nature is at work, and new viruses are born.  We build a new vaccine to stop a pandemic, and again, aided by our hubris, it mutates such that this morning's paper says we will only have a year before a new vaccine will be needed to address emerging variants cooking in places where people can't or won't get vaccinated.  We create a massive food creation and distribution system, and again, through hubris, build food systems that poison us and everything else, and natural selection begins to select for those persons who can survive the poison we put in our bodies, which isn't very many people.  If you live long enough, you will likely get cancer, again a genetic culling of the herd.  There is no individual blame, but instead collective blame for much of this.  Nature isn't sentient, as far as I can tell, or it would have created much stronger viruses by now to deal with all of our fuckery of the environment, or wiped out enough of us to prevent industrial society and the ills we have wrought in creating it.  

No, we ignore nature's fixed rules and make up our own, driven by the greed the Lorax warned about, and then suffer the consequences.  Like cillectively walking past a warning sign for a mine field and many of us being blown up as a result.  A natural consequence.  To be clear, many of us don't have real choices, or don't understand the consequences of our actions, given the way resource allocation works--and also we should remember that there has never been a time in world history when such few had so much wealth and so many living in abject poverty. Thus the stark disparity bakes in the disease disparities extant.  

Not sure what the future holds in store, but I hope its enough years to see grandchildren.