Fighting the Silent by Bruno Martins Soares

As we watch the young running around and laughing and playing, there’s a sense of loss, a sense that we can no longer feel as free as when we were children. Curiously enough, that’s not what we adults feel. It’s like being an adult is the summit of Freedom – adults can do whatever they want, no-one bugging them or ordering them around. And teenagers feel the same about adults. And toddlers will feel that of teenagers. I guess babies will feel that toddlers have more Freedom than they do. And she will feel more and more expertise and freedom, as she starts to speak, to crawl, to walk. The baby will, in some sense, feel it is the center of the world, as everyone will rush to fulfill her needs. It’s strange and frightful, but also full of stimuli and it hints at Liberty. When a baby (let’s say it’s a girl) comes out of her mother’s womb into the World, she has her first shock with Reality. People are putting other people in danger by being irresponsible. I’ve talked about this in the past, of course, but let me come back to it – because I’ve been witnessing behavior that really blows my mind in anger. But there’s an obvious limit to freedom: Reality itself. For many different reasons, the main one being that I find the ability to choose to be the main component of a happy life. I’ve talked a lot about Liberty and Freedom in this blog, as you might know. But we have respirators (when available) and health care systems and the Internet – better than a century ago. Still, yesterday Donald Trump said he would claim victory if less than 100,000-200,000 lives were lost to the Coronavirus – those figures actually dwarf the numbers from any other country right now.

We are much better now at responding to this kind of threat – even if our traveling abilities mean the infection spreads much faster – and so this one will certainly not come close to these numbers. The Spanish Flu killed around 50 million people. Just like a meteorite hitting the Earth or a Yellowstone super-volcano explosion. It’s one of those things that people were saying for a long time that it would come again and that you always thought they were exaggerating or it would skip a couple of centuries, or your lifetime.

Fighting the Silent by Bruno Martins Soares