BLACK DEATH

Death is often depicted as black, or possibly red, but perhaps it ought to be white, as it is in some countries.  We think of black as loss of consciousness, then of lost life processes, then of entering the velvet night of outer space or, if you are brave, nonexistence.  The total lack of light.

"Recently, Scientists have developed a color (nanosubstance), blacker than black, named as VantaBlack. It's so dark (black) that it absorbs everything except 0.035% of visible light."  The color for the death of a planet.

Black is associated with invisibility, though that would technically be "transparent" and some claim that dead people, though invisible, are still with us.  Not only individuals but also events can be either invisible or transparent, particularly disease pandemics.  It is clear and visible to us that the smallpox pandemic that destroyed North American civilization as it existed before 1492 is still with us and sometimes invited.  Trump has blocked the administration of flu vaccine to the immigrants held in unhealthy camps.  People have already died.  Trump himself is suffering from an inherited dementia, a disease with no cure so far and no known disease either, simply a prion -- a misfolded molecule.

Another killer disease is ebola, which comes out of the jungle population but has been prevented from sweeping across the planet -- so far.  A second jungle disease, at first undetected, has changed our lives:  HIV which progresses into AIDS.  These are only the contemporary versions of many waves of plague.

The following quotes come from DelancyPlace.com as it quoted Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

"In the 1300s, Europe's Black Plague brought death to 25 million people, by some estimates a third to a half of its population, and is one of the most famous episodes in history. But that plague had started in China just a few years earlier and killed more people in Asia -- perhaps as many as 40 million -- than in Europe."

"A person [with the plague] could appear healthy in the morning, but suddenly break into hot fever that rapidly gave way to chills accompanied by both vomiting and diarrhea. The bodies of individu­als who had only a short time earlier appeared active and robust suddenly and inexplicably broke down and began to dissolve before the horrified fam­ily observers. Blood began to ooze beneath the skin, which discolored the skin, lumps formed and oozed blood and pus in the groin. The lumps, sub­sequently called buboes from the Greek word for groin, then formed in the armpit and neck, and from them came the medical term for the disease: bubonic plague. When the lumps grew too large, they burst open. The lack of oxygen moving into the body and the dried blood beneath the skin made the person appear to turn black; from this dramatic symptom, the disease became known as the Black Death. After only a few agonizing days of tor­tured pain, the person usually died. In some victims, the disease attacked the lungs rather than the lymph nodes, and as the air in the lungs turned bloody and frothy, they drowned. As they died, they infected those around them by violent coughing, sneezing, and gasping. "According to the most plausible, but not completely verifiable, accounts, the disease originated in the south of China, and Mongol warriors brought it north with them.

"In 1331, chroniclers recorded that 90 percent of the people of Hopei Province died. By 1351, China had reportedly lost between one-half and two-thirds of its population to the plague. The country had included some 123 million inhabitants at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but by the end of the fourteenth century the population dropped to as low as 65 million."

"In the sixty years from 1340 until 1400, according to some estimates, the population of Africa declined from 80 million to 68 million inhabitants, and Asia from 238 million to 201 million. The total world population ­including the Americas, where the plague did not strike for another two centuries -- fell from approximately 450 million to between 350 and 375 mil­lion inhabitants, a net loss of at least 75 million, or more than a million people a year for the remainder of the fourteenth century."

Emphasis added by myself.

These are known, recorded, deadly plagues and I urge you to read both the whole quote on DelancyPlace.com and the Weatherford history. (I don't own it, but it's on my list.)

But particularly in present times the pandemics have moved from microbe invasions to our own production of toxins and spreading of poisonous additives in our food, cosmetics, and houses.  Asbestos, lead. air pollutants, and a plague of killer-intensity weather.  We don't see most of these, unless we take samples into labs for analysis and even then we don't always know what we're looking for, as in the deadly ingredient in electronic nicotine devices.  But they function as plagues -- addictions are plagues.

Perhaps the most deadly plagues of our times are cultural.  Once globalization began and television, the internet, world trade, travel and other forces of survival and expansion covered the globe, culture was no longer local, no longer woven into the ecosystem, but set free from previous limits that had prevented bad consequences.  This is uneven.  There are still people damaged or merely hampered by hanging on to old ways in quiet places.

More than any other dark issue I can think of, disease pits the individual against the group.  Because of attachment and empathy, which are biological and inescapable, we cannot let people we know and care about suffer without being tended and an attempt made to save them.  Though sometimes it is rational to let an individual die or be injured for the sake of the whole -- as in war or sport or the allocation of resources like money -- the Whole rules.  

In fact, this is the position of the authoritarians who want control of nations.  They want to make the Whole primary, even though these authorities are individuals or members of a small group privileged through wealth or heredity.  Maybe they are sincere in imposing deadly mass movements like seizing Ukraine's wheat crop to feed Russia or moving all intellectuals to menial jobs in rural places to prevent them from meddling or organizing concentration camps.  But as individuals, the suffering is immense.  How can it be moral or even effective in the long run?  Not even Trump's wall (a prime opportunity for draining money) can force people to stay on their own side when they lose people they love.