Hydrogen & Stupidity

Should The Wide World Roll Away

Originally posted 3-16-2003

A mystery disease with no cure. It used to be called life.

As of right now, researchers don't know if SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is caused by a virus or a bacteria. But they do know that neither antibiotics nor antivirals are doing any good, and worse, that the disease has a wicked way of infecting health care workers.

Medical experts have long worried about super strains of diseases that are beyond antibiotics. Perhaps people should remember that the conquering of infection (a medical miracle) is a fairly recent event in human history. (Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1929.)

Assuming, for a moment, that this disease is not the beginning of the end of life on Earth, it might be a useful lesson to those alleged educators who want to deny evolution and teach that wack-ass creation science. Remember the case of the Kansas State Board of Education?

Folks, evolution is not a theory in need of further fossil proof. Evolution is a fact. Everything evolves and adapts, and you don't need fossils to prove it. Tiny things, simple organisms, mutate at amazing rates. One of the best places to observe natural selection and evolution is in medicine. Yes, everything evolves -- even viruses and bacteria.

If I'm facing death in a raging epidemic, and I've been deciphering server logs, if I'm putting in free overtime while a new plague approaches, I will be seriously bummed. Perhaps we should indeed live every day like our days could end suddenly. It certainly makes a better slogan than a financial plan.

I found the whole concept of a worldwide alert on a rapidly spreading fatal disease quite unsettling. On a rational level, you play it down; on a cellular level, it connects.

Makes me want to smell my girlfriend's hair.

***

Stephen Crane, the guy who wrote "The Red Badge of Courage" from his imagination and wrote" The Open Boat" after experiencing life as a war correspondent, would have made a great blogger. He wrote books and articles and even poetry. Like most Americans, I can recite very few poems from memory, and unlike most everyone on the planet, most of the poems I can recite are Crane's.

So with sweeping death looming and The First Dumpling 102 miles away, this Crane poem came to mind. It's from The Black Riders and Other Lines. As with most Crane works, the first line is also the title.

Should the wide world roll away,
Leaving black terror,
Limitless night,
Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand
Would be to me essential,
If thou and thy white arms were there,
And the fall to doom a long way.

 

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