COMMENTARY: The pandemic is teaching us a valuable lesson: We are not in charge here. But will we listen?
By Sue Ellen Browder, EWTN News, 4/2/20
Sue Ellen Browder writes from Lander, Wyoming.
The coronavirus pandemic presents us with an extraordinarily new situation, one for which none of us was prepared. Questions, uncertainties and fears haunt us. Why did this happen? How can we stop it? When and where will it all end?
To find a single situation like the one in which we find ourselves today, we may have to go back a century or more — perhaps to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic or even to the Black Death during medieval times. Each of those diseases was estimated to have killed 50 million people worldwide. Because the world population was much smaller in the 14th century than it is today, the Black Death killed 60% of the people in Europe.
Science, with all its emphasis on progress, has helped us to control nature in ways that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors even two centuries ago. In all spheres of our lives — economic, commercial, medical, global relations, etc. — we have reached amazing peaks of power. ….