Those who fail to learn from history…well, you know the rest.

So I just ran across this article from a couple of days ago about the eerie parallels between the 1918 Spanish Flu and the current COVID-19 pandemic. More precisely, it’s an article about how the frustrations with the 1918 forced social-distancing and mandatory closing of businesses inspired many to rebel and push back. As understandable as their frustrations were, once they crossed into irrational revolt against even simple cautionary regulations like the mandates to wear face masks, the results were tragic and foreseeable. There was a second wave of the disease outbreak in the fall of 1918 and more lives were needlessly lost.

Are we on a path to repeating what happened in 1918? As we just came out of the Memorial Day weekend, in many places in the country it sure seems like it. We just saw headlining stories about acts of such mindlessness, sheer thoughtless stupidity that it makes one test which is stronger…one’s skull or the nearest brick wall. Hundreds of people packed into pool parties, backyard get-togethers, bars, and beaches while refusing to wear facemasks and ignoring social-distancing practices makes me wonder whether or not at some point in the very recent past we might have suffered from another silent pandemic. And that would have been a pandemic that quietly attacked the brains of huge swaths of the population and drastically reduced IQs. 

But as I had written before, I am completely sympathetic to the call for reopening of the country. It needs to be done before the current economic crisis slides toward a catastrophe to rival the Great Depression. Yet why do we have people asking for the restart of the economy sabotaging their own message with their madness? As infection rates are spiking in several parts of the country, why do we still have to listen to this insanity about how asking people to wear a simple facemask in certain public places is akin to a totalitarian takeover? 

Oh yeah, because despite the fact that we are living in a time when communication technology can give access to information, knowledge, facts, scientific data to virtually everyone at a fraction of a second, we are just incapable and unwilling to learn from history. Learning from absurd conspiracy theories on the internet and hysterical fear-mongering about a totalitarian takeover, sure. Learning from history and scientific authorities...forget about it.