Maybe Mother Nature is Culling the Herd
People are MAD!
Have you noticed? They’re MAD and almost anything can set them off. None of this was supposed to happen. The lockdowns, the masks, the vaccines that struggle to keep up with the new variants, the fear, the destruction of what we knew as normal are all — gone.
Only a few very old people can barely remember what life used to be like. Even they have forgotten that their ancestors lived with death on their doorstep day in and day out.
But this wasn’t supposed to happen to us.
So people are MAD. Some asshole actually knocked the teeth out of an airline attendant’s head at the mere mention of a mask. We’re gathering in the streets by the thousands to protest and storming school board meetings. We’re threatening to kill governors, superintendents, mayors, and other public officials. Families are divided. No one on either side of an issue can remain calm because everyone is MAD.
Modern humans seem to have completely forgotten that Mother Nature doesn’t give a damn about our happiness.
In fact, in a day and age when we promote positive thinking in order to gain access to the best life ever and presume that we’re entitled to our best life ever, it’s become almost impossible to accept the new normal.
In our arrogance, we’ve come to believe that the short lifespans of our ancestors had been permanently replaced by our current average lifespans.
In fact, most of us will go to great lengths to grab another five years of life. We’ve been told that we should fight to live as long as possible, to beat the odds and extend our lives beyond the average of seventy-eight years.
We can’t even remember that for most of history short lives were the norm.
Take my favorite authors the Bronte sisters, for example. Anne, Emily, and Charlotte did not have long, super blessed lives. They managed to produce some pretty great novels during a time period when women were expected to be content with domestic concerns, but Anne and Emily both died before they turned thirty. Charlotte lived the longest of all of her siblings. She managed to reach the ripe old age of thirty-six before the grim reaper claimed her soul.
But that’s not all!
Charlotte’s five siblings all died before the age of thirty. Two of her sisters died in their early teens and her brother Branwell was laid to rest before he turned thirty. Even her mom died in her thirties.
This tragic story is the story of humankind for centuries and centuries and centuries.
The average lifespan varied but never exceeded forty-five until about eighty years ago when we were able to double the lifespan in many parts of the world.
Yay, humans!
However, we still have countries where the average lifespan is somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty-four. I know, we don’t like to think about the poorer societies that lack good nutrition, modern conveniences like clean water, and good medical care. It’s such a threat to our positivity if we spare them a thought or two.
In our arrogance, modern humans have decided that the previous average lifespans of forty-five or less will never become the norm again. We have our babies and raise our children with far fewer worries than our recent ancestors did. So, this wasn’t supposed to ever happen again.
Oops! Turns out that humanity isn’t out of the woods yet.
While we research the possibility of expanding the lifespan even further, Mother Nature may very well have different plans for us. She may be heartlessly working on a plan to cull the herd. She’s done it before. She can do it again, I suspect. Deep down inside, everyone suspects that she could still whoop our asses.
Damn it! That makes us so mad, too.
We want to go to bed not having to worry about death sneaking through our front door and carrying away our kids into the night. We want to play harder, travel, buy stuff, enjoy our freedoms, build our little kingdoms without being bothered by the worries our ancestors lived with every day of their short lives.
So, we’re MAD as a nest of hornets.
Instead of taking the emerging information from current research as a precautionary measure to possibly help us stay safe, we resort to denial steeped in wishful thinking. We allow our anger to fuel nonsensical and outrageous behaviors. We become belligerent and uncooperative. Our anger clouds our judgement, what little we have, and produces barriers to practicing worthwhile protocols.
We begin to see information as the enemy designed to destroy our unprecedented privilege of modern times.
Not that we even remember that the privileges we have today are unprecedented. No, we’re to angry to count our blessings. Our anger prevents nobler actions and self sacrifice.
But Mother Nature isn’t impressed.
Contrary to popular opinions, she has never cared about our happiness. The universe does not have our happiness in mind either. Even the gods have little interest in whether we suffer or not.
This isn’t the first pandemic and it’s not going to be the last.
Trust me. No matter how mad we get, our anger will never stave off the relentless attackes that keep us from having the life we think we deserve.
Mother Nature will always do what is needed when it’s time to cull the herd again.
Teresa Roberts is a retired educator, author, world traveler, andprofessional myth buster.
