When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature call out, "Come!"
I looked and there was a pale green horse!
It's rider's name was Death; and Hades followed with him;
they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword,
famine and pestilence, and by the wild animals of the earth.
-The Apocalypse of John 6:7-8
A while back it was Ebola, before that it was SARS, and of course we have had the specter of AIDS with us for most of my life. Now it is the Corona virus. Plagues and pestilence are nothing new to humanity, the Black or Boubonic Plague is perhaps the most famous (because it happened in Europe), but there is good evidence that there have been multiple ravages of human populations over the course of history. Diseases were probably responsible for destroying the massive pre-colombian civilizations before we white folk ever started showing up on this side of the Atlantic. What happened to the Aztecs? The Maya? The Incas? The Lenape? European settlers played a part, but it probably had more to do with microorganisms than it did with Conquistadors. That doesn't make it less tragic, but our violent colonial impulses to wipe out the natives were mostly just a rear guard action. Diseases did most of the work before most of our scurvy ridden ancestors stumbled off the boats.
History gives us some grim warnings about the way diseases can crack our heads but good. In our globally connected world, we really do need to give some thought to how a virus that started in Wuhan China now has people in New York City wearing those little white masks. The potential for a pandemic is not a laughing matter. You can argue all day about the virtues and dangers of globalism, widespread contagion being a big hit on the minus column, but the fact of the matter is, we're probably not putting that genie back in the bottle and regressing to isolated tribal society.
While I'm not generally given to interpreting Revelation too literally, I think John of Patmos was actually a fairly astute observer of human society. Those horsemen really are pretty accurate symbols of our greatest perils, and they have been for a very long time. I know, that's not comforting, but what I'm going for here is that the humility it brings us can and should be a good thing on the whole.
Our collective response to crises like this is actually improving, even if it still leaves something to be desired. The world rallied to face the threat of Ebola even though a pretty short time ago most of the world would have just clucked their tongues and said, "too bad it happened, but at least it was far away from here." AIDS kicked us hard and left us with a bunch of bigotry and hang ups to sort through, but sort through it we did, and Magic Johnson is still hanging around.
I'm not saying that the Corona virus and other pestilence is here to teach us a lesson, viruses and bacteria don't have any purpose other than self-propagation. But pay attention to what things like this are teaching us about what it means to be humans in this world. We are learning that our connections might bring vulnerability, but connection is also what helps us solve the problems we encounter. It's pretty obvious that we can't get those riders back behind the seals, they're out there and doing their work. New and stronger diseases keep coming at us, new ways to kill and destroy are always coming down the pike, because they're getting better at what they do; we need to be doing the work of being better humans.
History gives us some grim warnings about the way diseases can crack our heads but good. In our globally connected world, we really do need to give some thought to how a virus that started in Wuhan China now has people in New York City wearing those little white masks. The potential for a pandemic is not a laughing matter. You can argue all day about the virtues and dangers of globalism, widespread contagion being a big hit on the minus column, but the fact of the matter is, we're probably not putting that genie back in the bottle and regressing to isolated tribal society.
While I'm not generally given to interpreting Revelation too literally, I think John of Patmos was actually a fairly astute observer of human society. Those horsemen really are pretty accurate symbols of our greatest perils, and they have been for a very long time. I know, that's not comforting, but what I'm going for here is that the humility it brings us can and should be a good thing on the whole.
Our collective response to crises like this is actually improving, even if it still leaves something to be desired. The world rallied to face the threat of Ebola even though a pretty short time ago most of the world would have just clucked their tongues and said, "too bad it happened, but at least it was far away from here." AIDS kicked us hard and left us with a bunch of bigotry and hang ups to sort through, but sort through it we did, and Magic Johnson is still hanging around.
I'm not saying that the Corona virus and other pestilence is here to teach us a lesson, viruses and bacteria don't have any purpose other than self-propagation. But pay attention to what things like this are teaching us about what it means to be humans in this world. We are learning that our connections might bring vulnerability, but connection is also what helps us solve the problems we encounter. It's pretty obvious that we can't get those riders back behind the seals, they're out there and doing their work. New and stronger diseases keep coming at us, new ways to kill and destroy are always coming down the pike, because they're getting better at what they do; we need to be doing the work of being better humans.
Something to think about, when considering the global situation
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