Bring Out Your Dead
The working title of this piece began with the word “Throw” but when I mentioned that to a friend, a Jesuit priest at the nearby university, he suggested it was “a bit too cold-hearted, inhumane 21 st Century.” Recognizing I may soon be in need of his services, I reverted to the historic version of the phrase. In 1347, almost 700 years ago, in Italy, where the toll is now climbing despite much of the country being on lockdown, a plague called The Black Death arrived with travelers from Asia. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Entire towns were wiped out. People who fled to the countryside did not know that livestock was also infected and contagious. Universities were abandoned. Learning and civilization shut down. Firm statistics are impossible to confirm, but some estimates say one-third to one-half of Europe’s population perished over the course of 3 to 5 years before the plague burned itself out. It may have killed more than 20 million Europeans and an estimated ...