Last warning

As Jean Shepherd once observed, "I have a garbage can mind."  I never know what will work its way to the surface.  Lately it has been a long-ago advertising campaign for a brand of margarine.  A woman dressed like a Greek goddess tastes the product and proclaims it butter.  No no, says an offscreen voice, it's Uncle Charlie's Margarine (or whatever).  Her face darkens.  "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!" she says.  There may be thunder at this point, I don't remember.

I keep thinking about this because it really feels like Mother Nature is screaming at us.  Before this year began, people were already worrying about the damage our species has done to the planet.  Rising sea levels, rising temperatures, the disappearance of arable land, threatened species, everybody knows the list.  Mother sent us a novel coronavirus to remind us that we are not really in charge no matter what we think.  Large sections of Earth simply shut down, and then she let us see how beautiful the world can be without internal combustion engines and coal-fired factories.  In some places people saw the stars or the distant mountains for the first time in decades.  Goats wandered through Welsh towns, kangaroos appeared on the streets of Melbourne, lions slept on a road in South Africa, flamingos filled the sky in Mumbai, and humans died.  It was more terrifying for being unpredictable.  Very smart people "sequenced" the RNA of the virus, but could not explain why it killed some and left others without even a cough.  

Soon the venal and the stupid decided that it was all a plot to inconvenience them.  They went outside and asserted their right to spread disease and death.  Mother hinted that maybe antibodies don't indicate immunity, maybe you can get it again.  Maybe it will return in the fall, in a new form that scorns vaccines.  To make sure she had our attention, she introduced the Asian giant hornet -- "murder hornets" -- into the United States.  An enemy you can see, though probably not much of a threat (remember the Killer Bees?).  Destroy the last wild places, she whispered, and unleash more novel viruses on yourselves, more unpredictable insects, more death.  You can go on torturing me, she proclaimed, but I will prevail and more of you will suffer.  Learn, you arrogant, big-brained monkeys!  It's nearly too late.  

Well, it was only margarine.