Darrell Castle talks about the plague year and the virus that is so disrupting American society.

Transcription / Notes

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR—REDUX

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday, March 20, 2020, and on today’s Report I will be talking about the plague year that we are currently in. The virus that the World Health Organization (WHO) tells us should be called Covid-19, which is a politically correct term to keep us from labeling it Wuhan flu, Kung-flu or some other such name. Those names are all racist in today’s world so we can’t use them. For our purposes, I will refer to it as Coronavirus, or simply the virus, even though I know that name is not specific enough to be technically correct.

The title of today’s Report was taken from Daniel Defoe’s book “A Journal of the Plague Year”, published in 1725 by Daniel Defoe. I first read Mr. Defoe’s book in high school, but it is a stark reminder that what we are going through in our world today has happened before. It is an account of the year 1665 in the city of London and the struggles of that City’s residents to survive the bubonic plague, which they called the black death. Wagons came down the streets each morning with the driver calling for people to send out your dead.

The story is in narrative form complete with graphs, charts, and government documents. It is fascinating how many of the things he tells about London are happening again today. At the time humanity had no microscopes and no idea where the plague was coming from. The prevailing theory was that it was God’s wrath on sinful humanity. The plague was far more terrible and lethal than our virus, but our virus has an advantage that old Europe’s plague did not have. Our virus can occur in Wuhan, China or Milan, Italy or San Francisco, California, then board an airplane and reappear anywhere in the world within hours. If the 1665 plague had airplanes perhaps there would be no humanity, but since then microscopes, especially electron microscopes, revealed the invisible world of disease to us.

However, we are not here to discuss 1665 Europe, we are here to discuss 2020 America. Here in America everything was going along just fine. My law firm was more profitable than it had been for awhile and I was optimistic for the first time in months. I had just spoken with a friend who runs a bookstore in another city, and she was having a great year but now it looks like she will soon be closed. My law firm will be working from home, with reduced staff after this week so everything is OK, until it isn’t. This spring, hopeful and renewing as always, brings pestilence and death as well as flowers. They used to bring us bread and the circus but now with all sports and concerts canceled, its just bread, and we shelter at home to eat it.

Is it true that lives of ordinary Americans can be destroyed almost immediately by someone eating a bat in China? That whole concept seems ludicrous on its face, but there is a real virus that came from somewhere. My wife’s cousin, a world-renowned physician and expert in infectious diseases, and leader in the effort to treat HIV is now positive for the Corona Virus, so we can conclude that it is real. A perfectly legitimate question is where did it come from, and how did it get here.

There are a few choices that we can look at but first let me say that I have no expertise or training in the medical or scientific fields that would give me insight. I try to use logic and apply that to the events that I see and read about. The first choice then, is that the virus jumped from animals to humans at a fresh foods market in Wuhan, China, and correspondingly spread all over China, and then it got on airplanes and infected the whole world. That is actually the story that we are expected to believe, and any other version puts us into a conspiracy nut category.

The second possibility is that the Chinese were working on bat viruses ...