Isn’t it about time that we recognize, accept that the time we’re presently living in, and with luck living through, Is a special time? Is it a once in a lifetime? Will we one day, as following other past and major interruption s in our lives get up and walk away from this one and get on again with our lives?

Our president would like that to happen immediately, and so wouldn’t we all. Don’t give so much attention to a bug, Trump is saying, for it is just a bug, in fact less than a bug since bugs we can see but not viruses.

But we’re told by the scientists, those who today are playing the role of the Delphic Oracle, much like as in the ancient classical world the oracle would be consulted before making an important decision, so now are we waiting on the scientists to tell us what to do.

Facing up to the bug attacking us we turn to science rather than to religion. In all the talk now going on about the frightening Bug I near no mention of God, of any God. Is that because, as we were told by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and others, that God has died, that God was no more? In any case I find myself that God is out of the picture, and the god fearing folk, unfortunately I say, have said or done nothing to make me change my mind.

Anyway I started to think of all these things when I read two news items among the Notifications on my iPhone, one after the other, just about an hour ago (It’s now March 24, 2020).

One was, from Bloomberg—
“The Dow surges more than 2,000 points, or more than 11 percent, on hopes for coronavirus aid package.

The other was from the Boston Globe —
382 new coronavirus cases confirmed in Mass. as state death toll rises to 11.

The death toll goes up and the Dow goes up. That’s improvement on the last numbers from last week, when the one, deaths, was going up and the other going down. I guess there is some question about what is happening now. What is most important, new cases and new deaths on the one hand, or the economy and more work on the other. Well of course both are important. But wouldn’t you like to think that getting people out from under a death sentence, that which threatens most of us, if not all of us right now, was more important than the economy. We are familiar with the huge devastation that past plagues have wrought. Why don’t we see this one as what it is, lookat the bug in its face, and if not staring it down at least push it away? Perhaps it’s because the isolation and unemployment that social distancing may bring about may be a death worse than death. In any case it makes you think about what is happening, and my own thoughts are not good.