The black ghost of the virus is visiting America.  We are afraid, outraged, insulted, bothered, inconvenienced, but not yet humble. The routine of our life has been disturbed.  Our rights as free and superior people have been disturbed.   We are too good to have to put up with this forced caring of others.  Altering our lives so others will not get sick and die.  That is just too much.  We are Americans.  We are superior. 

How long do we have to put up with this may morph for us into how precious our lives have been.  How sheltered, how unique, how much of an exception we have enjoyed.  In the scheme of things, this is a baby pandemic.  There are bird-flu viruses that kill 60% of their hosts.   Ek!!  There are poor people drinking water around the world that kills many children with diseases like cholera that are preventable.  But those people are not "the chosen".  They are not valuable.  They live on the wrong side of a border, a boundary made by humans arbitrarily to mark their own superiority. 

Inside our own country, we find we have no way to send everyone money or aid of any kind.  We have no way to give a poor person without insurance a test to see if they have the virus.  We send them back into the hordes to keep the virus alive.   We have no way to care for the prisoners crowded into jail and prison cells.  Let the guards perish.   We have no desire to help the immigrants gathering at the border with their children and dreams. 

We are not really set up to see individuals, their needs, their strengths, their individual humanity.  Will this pandemic help us to see the weak or will it take a much bigger pandemic for us to see the interconnected web of life that supports us all?  Will we see that we are part of a fragile web of life that holds all of us in a precious, temporary bubble of mutual dependencies.