The Pandemic Speaks

"You should know that I haunted the streets of Athens with measles. I watched Pericles die. I destabilized Rome and the Song dynasty. I humbled the Pharaohs, and killed peasants in the 14th century like hail on wheat. I wept with satisfaction during the siege of Tenochtitlan as my smallpox outdid itself. I dogged Napolean’s shivering armies with typhus. I violated England’s working classes with the blue death, cholera. I killed essential workers on the Panama Canal with yellow fever. I visited the trenches of the First World War with influenza. You’ve carried on with your great and complex ambitions, and I have laid them low. Need I go on with tales of Ebola, HIV and SARS?

I am an eternal force of history, and, let’s be honest, you are not. Memento mori." The Tyee, Andrew Nikiforuk.