The next pandemic
We are long overdue for a major pandemic along the lines of the Spanish flu of 1919, which killed 50 million people worldwide.
Having little children makes me constantly aware of the fragility of life—something I just didn't think about when I was 20 years old, but something which I now think about most days. The threat of an influenza epidemic is one of the things I'm aware of, among other possibilities.
This piece in The Sydney Morning Herald, which talks about responding to pandemics, is what started me on this current train of thought. Illness, death and suffering are not topics we enjoy contemplating but they put me in mind of Ecclesiastes 7:
A good name is better than precious ointment,
and the day of death than the day of birth.
It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
and the living will lay it to heart.
Sorrow is better than laughter,
for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise
than to hear the song of fools.
For as the crackling of thorns under a pot,
so is the laughter of the fools;
this also is vanity.(Eccl 7:1-6)
Earthly calamities and the associated mourning are, of course, just a foreshadowing of eternal judgement, which could easily come upon us before the avian influenza does. Perhaps it's for this reason or another that I find I spend even more time thinking about the coming judgement than I do about coming diseases.